Hands

With an experimental and melodic edge combined with a hardcore sound, Hands gives a perfect breath of fresh air to the heavier label known as Facedown Records. With their latest album, Creator, the Fargo-based act delivers a little something different than their label brethren. But apparently that’s not the only place the band stands apart from the others.

Speaking with the band’s Shane Ochsner, Soul-Audio got a bit of an inside tour of how the band’s different than anything else on their latest tour, how they handle being off to themselves and tells us that being from Fargo makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

Soul-Audio: The upcoming Humanoids tour is a big run coast to coast. How do you prep for that and what kind of a set list do you have?

Shane Ochsner: Honestly, we haven’t gotten any information on this tour but the dates. It’s something we’re trying to work out. I don’t know why we haven’t gotten the information, since we’ll usually find out what we’re looking at for a set time by now. But to prepare for this tour, we’ll just play stuff off of Creator. It’s an interesting tour in a way because we’re the only band on the tour that’s not this brutal metalcore with these blast beats and crazy breakdowns and all that kind of stuff. All three bands other than us are definitely in that genre and so we’re the oddball on the bill.

SA: Are you worried about how that will play?

Shane: Not at all. I think we were instantly excited because it’s really cool to get into a position like that. For me personally, I’m not really into that kind of music at all. The bad thing about that is that you’re not really interested musically in who you’re touring with. I’m definitely interested to meet people and hang out and things like that, but I feel like nothing’s really going to make me want to sit down and watch the sets every night. That’s a bummer for me because I like seeing different types of music, but obviously when you’re on tour, you’re having to do that every night for a solid month. [Laughs] Every band has their own tastes, so some are interesting and others I don’t find as interesting.

But I guess it would be cool to tour with bands that are more like Isis and things like that – bands that would be really cool and fit right in with what we’re doing. But at the same time, I’m really excited because it’s always fun to get in front of the metal kids and give them something different and see their reaction. Some people want nothing to do with it because they can’t dance to it and things like that, but others will come up to us after a show and say, ‘Hey, we don’t ever see much of that come through our town, so thanks for coming. It was cool.’ It’s just cool to see the reactions of everyone, even the ones on tour.

When we tour with someone, everyone has different opinions and stuff but it’s great to have different styles. It always comes back to the kids, so you’re giving them something different every night rather than having the same type of band four or five nights in a row. For the most part, the bands we’ve toured with seem to appreciate our style, so it’s all cool. I’m definitely excited about the Humanoids tour. [Laughs]

SA: Any specific place on the tour that plays well?

Shane: Honestly, the only place we’ve been on this tour is out on the West Coast. There are two dates in our home region of Minnesota and North Dakota and those shows will be great obviously for us. But other than that, we’ve only been out to the West Coast because our band has always been a central/Midwest kind of band. We’ve stuck to a lot of the Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma sorts of places. But the West Coast should be a little better for us because we’ve been there a few times. It will be interesting to hit these new spots and even to go back to the West Coast and see if people are into us or not. We never have any crazy expectations or anything.

SA: Is the Fargo scene a good place to be for a home base?

Shane: Not really. [Laughs] It’s a great city and all and I love Fargo very, very much but the music scene as of right now isn’t really anything special. It’s probably like every other place in the country where the music scene has its roller coaster of being really good and then it’s terrible and it has to climb up from there. Kids come and go and you have the college kids coming and going and the high school kids doing the same. It’s a fluctuating scene. There are some times where I remember it being amazing and that was about four years ago. It was just awesome.

Nowadays, it’s all slowed down. But there’s a lot of cool kids trying to get things going again. People are trying to bring in cool bands and stuff and it’s good to see the hard workers of the Fargo scene trying to keep things alive. But for us, I don’t think it gives us an advantage. When we play there, a decent amount of kids come out and they all enjoy it. It doesn’t seem to be any huge benefit and we never sell more than 20 bucks of merch every time we play Fargo. It’s just up and down.

• www.myspace.com/wearehands

Does it Resonate with you?

Name (required)

Email (will not be published) (required)

URL