This has a weird energy, a smokey commune bonfiring prog, hippy trippiness and the more esoteric end of the musical spectrum.
A flamboyant mirage angeling the experimental itch of the Ya Ho Wha 13, King Crimson and Comus (and a hell of a lot more). The Holy Family‘s head architect David J Smith has gathered together a host of like-minded travellers, including The Utopia Strong’s Kavus Torabi, and Téléplasmiste’s Michael J York to bounce ideas between.
A fusion of spacey collisions and peppered psychedelics, The Holy Family finds its inspiration in the shimmering surrealism of Angela Carter and displaced realities of Dorothea Tanning. Its narrative slips past, as snippets zero in, dreamily detonate, affix themselves like uneven tapestries alive with candied contours and half-lit rabbit holes.
That tindering ’70s Brian Eno off-cut that is “Skulls The…” coaxing the cobra to cast wavery silhouettes across the room. The acoustic dawn of “Inward Turning Suns” that merrily ribbons your head like a Woodstocked aquarius, its flowered braids kaleidoscopically kiltering into the Can-like candy of “Stones To Water” that beetles some tasty percussive recoil and gargling crocodiles. A diverse universe, satirically pinching at its influences as “Desert Night” lustfully devours a Comus-like glee, and the musicality drifts out from its moorings to Rorschach the uncharted. Those fragmenting Islamics on “Wrapped In Dust” delectably cutting into a scat-a-graphic vox, shivering into a cappella serpents of “World You Are Coming To” to raise out on some ’70s freak riff. A spark of melodic brightness rhythmically overspilling as those Pink Floyd-like shots fire the distance. Chords wash on through the chanting chorus, dervishly thrusting against that centrifugal refrain, sucking in a starry surround. A real shiver of joy melts in your ear with buttery magnificence, apes the July downpour smashing into the window.There’s plenty of meat on these bones (almost too much for one sitting), something the twelve-minute “Inner Edge Of Outer Mind” gloriously enriches. Its jumbling note frictions giving up hot-wired “God Save The King” Robert Fripp comparisons, disgorging into some disjointed funk that sweeps like broken nets teaming with silvering sprats. Those Thelonious Monk fingers-painting round the dialogue, chemically dialling into daggering shapes, spiralling arms firing off a rich soupy bow as the muscling bass of Sam Warren teases the focus, jousts with all that internal colour.
Another mighty fine ear workout that dribbles out in the zimmer dash of casbah-esque curls is “A New Euphoria”, a Faust-like tease temporally tippling into the pleasant fairground mirror ball of “See, Hear, Smell, Taste”, its jangling edges poking the modular monkey, all snare sniped and retiring to a folk-sung chakra of liquidised goo. It’s a joy to be lost in this album’s labyrinths. The softly spoken vocal snakes of “St Anthony s Fire” taking a nostalgic dip into the late sixties San-Fran scene to serve up one of this record’s more commercial undertakings, running seductively through the meadow barefooted, nomadically rivering the Amon Düül dream, tied to a mellow trance-inducing patter.The Holy Family give out an improvised (in the moment) glow that scenically pinches your senses like some strange soundtrack to a film that’s still lodged in the director’s brain, a stretchy halo of amber insecting your mind’s eye, oozing with potential.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
