Holy moly, these guys know how to rock

July 24, 2015 5:23 pm 7 comments Views: 2
It’s a big week for Holy Holy, with their first album released and a spot on the bill at

It’s a big week for Holy Holy, with their first album released and a spot on the bill at Splendour in the Grass.
Source: Supplied

THIS week’s album reviews from The Courier-Mail (ratings out of five stars):

ROCK

Holy Holy, When the Storms Would Come

(Wonderlick/Sony) ****

A life in music is like entering a club, you meet people with similar tastes, people who like the same things or show you new things to love.

Brisbane-raised Timothy Carroll first met Oscar Dawson, from Melbourne, when they were 19 and serving as volunteers teaching English in Thailand.

They had guitars and a connection was made. They returned to Australia and went on with their lives, university, Dawson playing in bands in Melbourne, Carroll working behind the bar at Brisbane venue The Troubadour in the Valley, later reopened as Black Bear Lodge.

After hours Carroll would test out his songs with other budding songwriters who gravitated to the venue.

Carroll released the For Bread & Circuses album in 2011, the same year he reconnected with Dawson while both were in Europe. Without any grand plan they did some writing and demo recording just to see what would come out. And good things have been happening ever since.

The result is something greater than the sum of the parts, and Holy Holy release their debut album this week and play Splendour in the Grass today.

Carroll’s solo album was more gentle and intimate, acoustic guitar-based. Holy Holy crank up the electric guitars and the vibrant colours, and a song like the six-minute anthem Pretty Strays For Hopeless Lovers opens sweetly but builds until Dawson unleashes a Neil-Young-with-Crazy-Horse guitar maelstrom of admirable intensity. It’s possible to ignore one more singer-songwriter with his acoustic guitar. It’s not likely anyone can do that with a song like Pretty Strays.

While melody remains king, there’s a real sense of atmosphere to Holy Holy’s music, the feeling of a storm that’s about to break. Electric guitars glisten in the sun, a hint of The Edge here, a touch of Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd there.

Holy Holy have evolved into a tight band unit, with the rhythm section of drummer Ryan Strathie (formerly of Hungry Kids of Hungary), bassist Graham Ritchie (Airling), plus producer Matt Redlich on keys, whose work you will probably know from Ball Park Music and Emma Louise.

These songs have a musicality and attention to detail that lift Holy Holy above the pack.
A Heroine is a folk-rock tale with twin lead guitars of a kind that powered ’70s bands like Wishbone Ash. On History Carroll sings: “You know I risked it all just to feel my burning skin, the water’s cool and closing in, the dark pools black and eddying,’’ while the band complements the exhilaration of pushing into dangerous waters. It’s a song that surges like a wave.

You Cannot Call For Love Like A Dog rides on Strathie’s rock-solid rhythm; Holy Gin starts with woozy, dreamy chords before the drums kick into gear; The Crowd brings the temperature down to close with piano chords and a Floyd-esque slide guitar.

This project has taken Carroll and Dawson all over the globe: bringing it all together to record in Brisbane completes the circle with an album that should take them to places neither could have imagined when they met as young men in Thailand.

Noel Mengel

Blue Note supergroup

JAZZ

Various Artists, True Blue: 75 Years of Blue Note Records

(Blue Note) ****

I miss labels, their importance downgraded in the digital age when you can buy an album and not know who released it, or even who played on it. And I hate it when iTunes or streaming services don’t give album information. No such problems on this four-CD celebration of the American jazz label, home at some point or other to many of the big names of the golden years of jazz, from Herbie Hancock to Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Blue Mitchell, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard and Ron Carter. The emphasis is on the best-known stuff (Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island, Coltrane’s Blue Train, Monk’s Straight No Chaser etc) so jazz aficionados will know much of it, but for a beginner’s guide it’s superb. After jazz’s commercial peak the label was occasionally used to add cred to signings like Norah Jones and this collection does reflect the label’s easy-on-the-ear side. But every recording date and musician is credited, thank you, and if you walk into a cafe playing True Blue, you’ll feel you’ve come to the right place.

Noel Mengel

METAL

Lamb of God, VII: Sturm und Drang

(Nuclear Blast) ***1/2

Lamb of God’s eighth studio album (helpfully titled Seven) is also their first since frontman Randy Blyth did prison time in the Czech Republic over the death of an audience member he pushed off the stage at a 2011 concert. Yet while the subtitle translates to “Storm and Stress”, that dark chapter is only referred to twice on the album — maybe Blyth’s memoir Dark Days was cathartic enough. “My hands are painted red … I can’t recognise myself,” he screams on 512, named for his cell number. Still Echoes, meanwhile, broods over the nearby disused execution room. Elsewhere, the record is dark enough. “Paranoia writes our cheques,” Blyth roars on Engage the Fear Machine, and on the maximum-RPM Anthropoid: “We are the faces of the end … the architects of ruin.” Meanwhile, Defusing Pandemic preaches personal responsibility: “No one is coming to save you from yourself.” Erase This is almost a hardcore jig, while Torches features machinegun percussion. Most accessible are Embers, with its haunting vocals, and Overlord, which has shades of Faith No More.

John O’Brien

Sun Kil Moon

ROCK

Sun Kil Moon, Universal Themes

(Rough Trade) ****

You saw Boyhood, right? US songwriter Mark Kozelek’s Universal Themes is like that — like life, or art that feels like life — the banal and the beautiful, the possum with the damaged foot, sick friends, the time Gomez covered your song at a concert, the stolen backstage kiss, childhood recollections, a ginger cat looking for a belly rub, feeling like Jimmy Page walking in the mountains behind Aleister Crowley’s house. He employs the same stream-of-Mark technique revealed in last year’s superb Benji, although this time the songs aren’t about death (mostly). Like life, this album is sometimes harrowing, challenging. And, like life, that just makes the most beautiful parts more intense. All the tracks are long — up to 10 minutes — but break down into suites of music. How much Kozelek is too much? There has been a lot of him since he and his songs became the stuff of controversy. Even fans have their limits, but with Benji, and now this, he has struck a rich vein. This is music that says “life is short, enjoy every belly rub”.

Noel Mengel

SOUL

Leon Bridges, Coming Home

(Columbia) ****1/2

So fixated is he on the classic soul era of the 1950s and ’60s that Texan wunderkind Leon Bridges wears the clothing of the period when performing. Even the cover art of Coming Home is a nod to old labels such as Verve, Blue Note and, yes, Columbia, who signed Bridges on the strength of two songs — one of them the title track of this stunning debut, the other a lilting paean to his mother, Lisa Sawyer, who brought him up as a single mother. He might have been born in 1989 but Bridges sings like the love child of Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, twin pillars of a time when soul, descended as it was from gospel, was all about vocal purity and lustful yearning. Bridges has both qualities to burn, and adds his skeletally tasteful guitar to equally minimalist drums, bass, tambourine, tenor sax, wisps of organ and a sharp doo-wop backing vocal duo, all recorded on vintage analogue equipment in keeping with the studied retro approach. But none of it ever sounds stilted, thanks to Bridges’ immaculate phrasing, his gift for a vocal melody and seemingly effortless sense of cool.

Phil Stafford

ROOTS

Jed Rowe, The Last Day of Winter

(Independent) ****

Melbourne songwriter Rowe falls in the spaces between country and folk-rock, the world explored by everyone from The Byrds to The Jayhawks and Australian fellow travellers such as Raised By Eagles. There is a sepia tone to the album art and sometimes a sepia tone to some of the music too, which on occasions has the feel of ’70s singer-songwriters such as Jesse Winchester and Australia’s Glenn Cardier. There is a timeless feel to tracks like Miss What Might Have Been, with its clunky upright piano, trumpet and banks of harmonies, and Keep Talking Baby, with Rowe’s deft acoustic guitar finger-picking to the fore. Rowe has a strong, pure voice that cuts through on these 11 tracks, whether it is heartfelt ballads like Rise and Fall and Bar Room Bird or wind-in-your-hair country-rock tunes such as Let the Colour Come In. The album also sounds great: recorded and produced by Jeff Lang and enhanced by Rowe’s multi-instrumental skills on slide guitar, piano, lap steel and fiddle. For evidence of his skills as a songwriter, check Black Rain, as fine a tune as I’ve heard this year. You’ll recognise the setting too!

Noel Mengel

Babe 20th concert

CLASSICAL

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Babe Orchestral Soundtrack

(ABC Classics) ****1/2

George Miller and Chris Noonan’s 1995 film Babe became a gem in our national artistic and cinematic psyche, a film based on Dick King-Smith’s simple tale about a pig who wants to become a sheep dog. Nigel Westlake conducts Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in this 20th anniversary recording of his (revised) music score, now a symphonic suite in its own right, reflecting and enlarging the visions of the film’s creators. Its 19 musical vignettes with titles such as Them Wolves, A Pig’s Proper Place, The Seeds of Destiny, Crime and Punishment are sombre and jolly in turn, some with classical quotes from composers Delibes, Grieg and Pierpont’s Jingle Bells. The first movement This is a Tale foreshadows the mighty finale featuring Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony (No 3) that also appears briefly in Away to Me, Pig! This Toby Chadd CD production will delight those who share Westlake’s dictum (among many in his inspiring notes for the booklet) that “an unprejudiced heart can change the established order’’. How true.

Patricia Kelly

www.news.com.au/entertainment/music

Leave a Reply