"The outfit's airy vocals – courtesy of Phoebe Baker and Lou James – and pristine harmonizing have earned Alpine global acclaim"
-John D. Luerssen, Rolling Stone, 2013
Melbourne-based indie electro-pop sextet Alpine's sonicscapes are undeniably well-constructed, but, as Fred Thomas of AllMusic.com notes, the perfectly placed synth-beats, guitar-driven hooks, and flawless vocals harmonies can create an impersonal touch :
"Alpine create an atmosphere of almost sterilized pop perfection, built on sparklingly clean production, cold dynamics, and sharp harmonies from dual lead vocalists Phoebe Baker and Lou James. With pristine pop production in the same vein as manicured megastars like Phoenix and Bat for Lashes, Alpine's music sounds like it was subjected to a white glove test, with no messy emotional overflows and never a hair out of place sonically. That's not to say it's without verve, but just that the arrangements are so precise the songs feel almost airless at times, with no rough edges to snag the listener in between hooks."
'Hands' is definitely one of the most arresting tracks on the album. It manages be immediately arresting, quirky and catchy, and yet the meaning of the sound is mysteriously elusive, even after multiple listens. The lyrical hook grabs your attention with the help of lurching synths, without giving away the message easily:
'It's okayTo feel the rainOn my handsMy loveMy enemy'
As the song draws to an end, its easy to fail to observe that the lyrics have been altered slightly (the airy vocal delivery doesn't really help to clarify this):
'It's okayTo feel that ringOn my handsMy loveMy enemyOhhh'
Is 'Hands' thus about some sort of anxiety of 'putting a ring on it', i.e. about the lyrical persona being torn between wanting to be free 'to feel the rain', but also wanting the security of marriage? Is this why 'my love' is also 'my enemy'? Is it 'ultimately' about the emotional roller-coaster ride that a woman goes through while deciding on whether to give a man 'her hand' in marriage?
But the track isn't really about hitting the message home to the listener; the point seems to be in the act of fleshing out an urgent, unavoidable state of emotional limbo and uncertainty. Thomas' observation about how Alpine manages to avoid "any messy emotional overflows" seems particularly relevant here; there seems to be a gap between the emotional core of the lyrics and the listener's felt experience of the track. Like the music video, which seems to be working overtime to pull-off 'quirky, mysterious and perplexing', the track just isn't meant to be 'easy'. And that could be a great thing, depending on the kind of music listener that tunes in...
