Music: Raising (Vampire) hands

Typical Minnesota band: Right when it lands a deal with a reputable indie label, finishes a national tour with a hip new buzz act and starts working with an experienced manager, Vampire Hands suddenly hangs in limbo now as co-vocalist Colin Johnson plans to move to Montana. Fortunately, nothing else about Vampire Hands is typical. The quartet's innovative sound is built on pulsating, hypnotic rhythms, reverb-drenched guitar and eerie yet beautiful vocals and tribal-like chants -- equal parts Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, experimental bands like Can and influential punk acts ranging from the Stooges to Wire.

It's an odd enough concoction that Johnson's relocation 1,200 miles away is even being seen as a chance to spark a whole new creative phase. The band might start recording via the Internet. It might meet up with Johnson on the road. It probably will play shows as a three-piece. No one knows for sure how things will play out.

Which is perfect.

"The excitement in this band has always stemmed from constant challenge," said Johnson. "We enjoy any challenge, and in fact we thrive off it. There's never been a fear of, 'What's it's going to sound like?' It's always, 'Let's dive in and not worry about what we are or aren't able to do.'"

Before diving into its next era, Vampire Hands plays one last gig under Johnson's local residency tonight at the Turf Club. The show is a release party for its third and best album, "Hannah in the Mansion."

More proof of Vampire Hands' eccentric ways, the new record will be sold as a limited vinyl release on the hip indie label Secretly Canadian's vinyl-geek imprint, St. Ives. All 300 copies feature unique artwork hand-crafted by the band. It's also available as a download on iTunes, but the guys don't seem as interested in promoting it that way.

"We shoot ourselves in the foot with these sort of things all the time," Johnson said two weeks ago, sitting with his bandmates in a semicircle around the coffee table in his apartment in Minneapolis' Seward neighborhood.

By far the most outspoken band member, Johnson talked with the same steady rotation as the turntable. No exaggeration, when the music shut off at one point in our interview, the bespectacled rocker clammed up and acted flustered. When the needle dropped again, he went right on rolling.

The other three members of the band -- bassist/singer Chris Bierden, guitarist Chris Rose and drummer Alex Rose (Chris' younger brother) -- didn't seem to mind Johnson doing most of the talking. They also let him eat up most of the spotlight onstage, where he excitedly bounces between a stand-up drum kit and keyboards.

It astonishing, then, to hear that: a) Johnson suffers from stage fright and won't mind bowing out of gigs while in Montana; and b) the other band members believe they can keep performing as Vampire Hands without him.

Said Chris Rose, "I feel like it's better than us stagnating and recycling the same thing over and over."

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"The best part about growing up in the suburbs is everything seems cool, and everything has a certain mystery to it," Johnson said.

The Roses and Johnson played in bands together around high school. Bierden and Chris Rose bonded over music when they were away at school in Milwaukee. Vampire Hands formed upon their return in November 2005. In less than a year, the quartet made City Pages' Picked to Click list and became one of the must-see acts in Twin Cities indie-rock clubs, somewhat to the quartet's surprise.

"When we started the band," Alex Rose said, "I think we wanted to be a noise-rock band. But we slowly came to the realization we're all basically classic-rock dorks."

Johnson came up with the group's name some two years before it formed, he said. He has regretted it for the past two years, though, as Cape Cod-inspired indie-pop darlings Vampire Weekend -- "that Jimmy Buffett cover band" to Johnson -- became a hot commodity, causing confusion at last year's South by Southwest festival and points beyond.

The band's new manager, Keri Wiese (also Tapes 'N Tapes' handler), tried to tell Johnson that the dueling Vampire names might not be a bad thing. One fan on the Hands' MySpace page discovered them while searching the web for the Weekenders instead. But Johnson poo-poohed the positives.

The Hands heard the Weekend comparisons on tour last winter with Wavves, a home-taping psychedelic whiz-kid from San Diego whose debut had his Minneapolis-reared openers playing to several hundred fans each night. Even before the tour, one of the heads of Secretly Canadian -- the label behind Antony & the Johnsons, Foreign Born and Damien Jurado -- got turned onto the Hands one day while shopping at Treehouse Records in Minneapolis.

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Named after a night the band stayed at an abandoned old-folks home on tour in Kansas City, "Hannah in the Mansion" finally bottles the lightning of Vampire Hands' hair-raising, nerve-tingling live sets.

It's the first album the group has recorded together in one room. Typically they've done it in pieces (a byproduct of having three songwriters with their own recording equipment), but this time they hammered out the tracks mostly with one long dusk-to-dawn session in January at their rehearsal space.

"We never had the technology or the space to do it this way until now," Johnson said. "As soon as we started, we were all like, 'This is how it has to be!'

The definitive track is "Me & You Cherry Red," which was the title track of Vampire Hands' last record but is way more electrifying here -- the result of the band playing it all together vs. what was essentially a solo track by Johnson. Several other songs also better reflect the burning live sound, including the sinister, dueling-drums workout "No Joy" and the howling finale "Funny Stories."

Surprisingly, the album also boasts a couple of folky, pretty, hazy numbers, "Invisible Stairs" and "Bodies Alone," which seriously wouldn't be too out of place on a Lovin' Spoonful record. The band found these tracks more challenging than the more demented-sounding tunes.

"Darker songs are almost easier to make. We started to fall back on that formula," explained Bierden, whose falsetto voice fuels "Bodies Alone."

With Johnson's relocation, any fear of following a set formula will fly out the window. Bierden and the Roses hope to try to perform as a three-piece within a month or so. They will probably reunite with Johnson at the CMJ Festival in New York in October.

"We were sort of already recalibrating our songs anyway, talking about Colin moving to second guitar and things like that," Chris Rose said.