It’s clear from the title alone that The Shaky Hands’ Let It Die is a record of lament, and of letting go ”“ or learning to. If the title weren’t enough, the lyrics paint a rather obvious picture: “You’re always leaving, your pain remaining/ Here you are, and there’s no explaining” from ‘Don’t Fail Me Now,’ and “You’re all I have, there’s no else’/ Is what you wrote, put it on my shelf/ Where are you now and why couldn’t you wait?/ I wanna look you in the eyes, I wanna set it straight” from ‘Gonna Hold You Tonight.’If only the music was as remarkable as some of these couplets. The frustrating truth of Let It Die isn’t that the songwriting is bad, it’s just monotonous. The band is best when it decides to move away from its original, tried-and-true sound. The solemn, campfire cut ‘Tonight’ is the best of the collection simply because it’s the only one of its kind. It actually stands out. The bar-room baroque pop of ‘Already Gone’ also lessens the tedious blunt force trauma for the same reason. Likewise, ‘Love Curse’ is the only song here with a groove, its danceable bassline helping to color an otherwise gray tapestry.Conversely, song pairs like ‘Slip Away’ and the title track or ‘All You Recall’ and ‘Allison And The Ancient Eyes’ can really only be separated by their respective lyrics, which also happens to be the one aspect of this record that’s consistently appealing. For example, Nicholas Delffs ponders in aggravation “How the hell did we all get so lost?” throughout ‘Allison.’ Or how about “You’re so sad and don’t even care/ And this life has been so unfair/ But you’re the one with two black eyes/ Standing back in florescent light” from the ‘Slip’. Without the emotionally honest words, the majority of the album wallows in its own abyss of indie-pop-by-way-of-the-Beatles.What pisses me off so much is what Let It Die could have been with a little more panache, a little more experimentation, a little more”¦anything. It’s obvious that the guys in the Shaky Hands are talented musicians and songwriters so it’s infuriating to listen to an album like this. I hope this is just the result of a half-assed attempt at fulfilling a contract instead of a band without ideas. A handful of songs here suggest the latter isn’t the case but the rest strongly argue against. It appears the band has taken the album’s title as a personal motto.

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