Holy Fuck's USP has been making instrumental music that soars and comes on like a malfunctioning range of robots without the aid of sequencers or computer noises, everything played kind of as live through analogue keyboards, scratchy guitars, sundry tone generators and percussion. While there's always been a groove element to their noisemaking, Latin feels like it's being played out on a grander scale, as if those robots had marshalled together and formed an advancing army. The rhythm is motorik, the keyboards form deceptively pretty patterns, even melodic occasionally, and everything drives forwards with a purpose that's not so much smoothed out from 2007's LP as made more coasting.
Not to say there's only chinstroking ambience afoot. In fact there's precious little that doesn't attempt to command the senses and feet in some way, especially given the early one-two of Red Lights' percussive Detroit-by-night jam and Latin America riding on a rhythm not too far removed from LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge before cascading into slowly disintegrating passages of synth. Some of it utilises the tricks of 3am in a field dance music, holding back midway through and building up to a tumescent, overarching finish, as with final track P.I.G.S. and its aereated soundscape gradually thrust back into the maelstrom, the coda indicative of a hefty meatiness that accompanies the 'bass' line on the likes of SHT MTN. Nobody else really sounds like Holy Fuck and they know it, but that's not to say they couldn't pull together something that still uses rickety keyboard sounds and Neu! propulsion and give it new found ambition.
[Spotify]
Red Lights
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1 comment:
I've only recently gotten into this group, but they're not bad. Their music is on the tiring side; I find it difficult to play more than a couple times through.
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