Oak Hands – A Circle With Many Centres – LP

The title of the new Oakhands EP A Circle with Many Centers is a reference to a short story by Haruki Murakami and at the same time reflects Oakhands’ realization that life and emotions cannot be logically broken down and dissected the way they assumed and practiced on their previous album The Shadow Of Your Guard Receding. Instead, feelings simply have to be experienced — lived — and all personal conflicts are more deeply and universally interconnected than one would like to admit.

At the root of all interconnected life questions lies depression, which permeates and stifles all emotions. It is an unavoidable theme both socially and individually, right in the heart of the zeitgeist. Depression, the great opponent of all feelings — or even the great absence of all feelings — cannot simply be analytically unpacked, it is just there. And on this EP, it stands in opposition to the kaleidoscope of emotions on their debut album and all of its analytical attempts at explanation.

So A Circle with Many Centers is — depending on how you look at it — the continuation, answer, or refutation of their debut album. That album explored its own emotions with almost manic precision, lyrically and analytically, and was artistically (not scientifically) inspired by Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.

If you will, A Circle with Many Centers can also be read as a late coming-of-age record — a post-adolescent record about the “true” transition into adulthood around age 30 and late personal Sturm & Drang phases. It’s about realizing where the root of all personal conflicts lies: depression.

Musically, the EP is — as usual — multi-layered, but especially tightly connected to the lyrical and conceptual ideas. Their trademark Sturm & Drang sound — a powerful and glowing amalgam of post-hardcore, indie, and (scr)E(a)mo — is stretched out in more contrasting and defined ways. With differentiated math-pop, stylistically and emotionally intense post-punk traits (shout-outs to The Cure and Gilla Band), and elements of doom. But even impulsive blast beats in major chords and dreamy power ballads vividly score the album’s continuities and contrasts. 

All LPs come with a screen-printed B-side!

Pressing info:

125 × white black marbled
375 × clear black marbled