After many collaborative projects, a brilliant first full solo album by the Belfast producer and musician since 2008’s The Holy Pictures, here featuring the vocals of Raven Violet throughout, this passionate, powerful, often political noir-synth pop release charts the unravelling of British society over the past decade. It includes updated versions of the previously released singles Hope Is The Last Thing To Die and It’s Over If We Run Out Of Love (co-written with Noel Gallagher) and a recording of an unreleased song by Holmes’ late friend, the pioneering producer Andrew Weatherall, I Laugh Myself To Sleep. With 14 tracks in all, it’s packed with highlights, the emotive, soaring Hope Is The Last Thing To Die, It’s Over If We Run Out Of Love, and perhaps best of all, Necessary Genius, a tribute to some of the great pioneering music artists we’ve lost of the past few years, including most recently Sinéad O’Connor and Terry Hall. It’s a bittersweet record of fabulous tunes, moral fibre and also melancholy for things lost and gone wrong.
There are spoken word accounts from Afghan and Ukrainian refugees now welcomed as residents in Belfast, alongside a Palestinian ambulance driver and French and Irish observers of the UK’s turmoil of recent years. Their voices add to the feeling that this record is a call to action, a motivation and a head clearing, slate wiping journey. As the opening, rather very topical opener, When People Are Occupied Resistance Is Justified, puts it: “I wanna sleep on the wind, I wanna live, I don’t wanna rust / I wanna breath, I wanna fly, not rot in the dirty dust.”
And so there’s also hope and defiance, especially with truly authentic, credible, eclectic artists like Holmes making such great music. Out on Heavenly Recordings.
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