Minneapolis-based guys and gals, The Idle Hands, released their EP Life is Beautiful March 1 on Pretty Kids Collective. This follow-up to their 2009 LP, The Hearts We Broke on the Way to the Show (THWBWS), was inspired by “the regrets, longing and damage that pile up in a life lived in after bars.”
The Idle Hands first turned heads with their self-released EP Loaded. Then-producer Mark Needham crafted very well put together catchy tunes, but the band didn’t feel the generic sound represented who they were or wanted to become.
This EP captures the new direction they started to head in with THWBWS. Front man Ciaran Daly expressed, “when we were 
making Life is Beautiful at one point I asked [producer] Tony Lash to ‘destroy everything about this track that makes it a pop song’. The bones might be there, but the flesh is all feedback and emerging harmonics. We wanted whatever beauty was in the record to emerge from that.”
“We distorted nearly every synthesizer sound, often beyond recognition. We recorded hours of guitar noise, sheets and sheets of feedback, and handed it to Tony to use,” the singer further explained. And despite the “stretches of tedium” involved in the recording process they “couldn’t be happier with the results.”
Their songs come together organically, which is made obvious by how much they’ve evolved since Loaded.
“Either a song starts playing in my head and I get out of bed to find a guitar so I don’t forget it, and then capture the arrangement and guitar sounds I was hearing with the band later. Or Criostoir [Daly’s brother] is noodling around at practice and starts playing a bass line, and we hammer it out over a few practices. I start singing whatever comes into my head and then clean it up later,” he said.
Daly acknowledged that there is nothing more satisfying than the “weird combination of jealousy and inspiration you feel when a friend writes something really good. When they tell you that a song you wrote did that to them too, that’s something that will carry you through.”
Listeners can take what they will from Life Is Beautiful. Daly philosophized that “if you burn the candle at both ends, it gives a lovely light. Lovelier perhaps if you know going in that there’s a price and you have decided you’d rather pay it. That’s what the record’s about. What they take away from it is what they’re about.”
Life is Beautiful might not contain a track that will have “publishing checks as consistent as The National Anthem,” but The Idle Hands have put out something that they can stand behind and be proud of.
god byrjun