News Cuffs

Kind of like teachers in the summer holidays, you half expect band members to be switched off or unplugged like a machine when they’re not doing their duties as a musician – loading and unloading vans, doing countless mindless interviews, strumming a guitar onstage or whatever. So when a band splits up, the confusion is compounded. Where do they go from here? Obviously, being cut from a different cloth, they can’t convert to being like us mere mortals, working day jobs and crying ourselves to sleep over the sheer hell of it all. Most of them simply set up and start again.

Cuffs is a four piece from Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you think you’ve heard their jangly, melodic guitar pop before, you might be right. As well as sounding like a more mellowed out version of early Tokyo Police Club recordings, the band were also around under a different banner a few years ago, trading under the name Pants Yell. Though a few of the band members have changed and the moniker has been altered, the sound largely remains the same, and brilliantly so.

The entire output of the band appears to be limited to three demo recordings so far, tagged through their bandcamp as ‘indie-pop’, a description woefully bereft of the depth of emotion and scope of their sound. Rather than being part of the countless landfill bands that have plagued the radio since the turn of the millennium, these are works that deserve to be belong with the pantheon of great tuneful, twinkling guitar pop bands. Whichever alt celebrity is looking at making this decade’s answer to Garden State has got a great starting point for their soundtrack here.