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Eye-rolling hipsterdom may have reached new heights with Brooklyn boy/girl duo the Hundred in the Hands, who lifted their moniker from the Fetterman Massacre of 1866. History buffs from that other Williamsburg will tell you it's where 80 white soldiers were ambushed and killed by Lakota warriors in what is now Wyoming. But there's certainly more Siouxsie Sioux than simply Sioux in the Hundred in the Hands' gloomy post-neu-disco dance-floor numbers. Eleanore Everdell and Jason Friedman have concocted 40 minutes of essentially one take on dark, minimalist electro-pop, a slinky echo of New York underground cool that creates a sleek, polished, instant pop identity for global consumption. "Dressed in Dresden" rumbles as Friedman's slashing guitar cuts over Everdell's laid-back baroness vocals (they fall somewhere between a bored Emily Haines and a squeal-free Karen O), but there's just enough of a drag on that Djarum Black clove to keep the disaffected youth solemnly dancing by themselves at 4 am. "Young Aren't Young" whizzes along with Bobby Orlando's disco on the mind; the feisty "Last City" snarls out the best new-wave chorus Berlin's Terri Nunn never got to sing. It's all a very pretty sequined package, but moving forward, the Hundred in the Hands might find their music as cornered as Captain Fetterman's troops were off the Bozeman Trail.
