Holy Fuck - Congrats
Drowned In Sound 90
Back in 2006, I saw Holy Fuck play an on-first support show to the then-gargantuan Sunshine Underground at Leeds Uni. I’d heard HF’s first, self-titled record released a year before, and been captivated by their penchant for jamming battered old electronic equipment through guitar pedals over a driving krautrock rhythm section. The gig was short, but great, and I even snagged a t-shirt, which I accidentally wore to a job interview once. Anyway, the point is I’d kinda forgotten all about Holy Fuck.
The band, based around core members Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh, released two albums up until 2007, disappeared for three years, popped another one out, then went awol again. Their second record, just called LP, refined their more jazzier moments, steadily filing down the loose jam wigouts that made their first album so expansive and head-fucky, into more manageable chunks. Not that that was a bad thing, but y’know, I do love nine-minute-jazz-fused wigouts. Then nothing much happened until 2010’s Latin, which flew so far under the radar, I had to do an 'oh yeah, I thought that was them' moment whilst perusing their discogs in preparation for this.
So fast forward six (!) years, and here we have Congrats, a record which sees them perfectly, finally, in balance between their jazzy, wiggy madness, and their strangely melodic sensibilities. Thank (Holy) Fuck for that.
Opener ‘Chimes Broken’ is actually a pretty good way to introduce them as a whole, and to welcome back weary travellers into their fried sonic world of distorted, gnarly basslines, hyperactive drum kit workouts and soaring drones floating over the top of the chaos. So, hello Holy Fuck, my my how I’ve missed you.
It’s not all unabashed chaos though, as there’s a creeping subtlety to their sound, which seeps into the carefully constructed ‘Tom Tom’, which feels like a noir-y night drive kind of thing - all churned atmospherics and slow motion, pulsating rhythms. There’s also a distant, barely there vocal, processed through delays and ping pongs around the slowly-melting sonic landscape.
‘Shivering’ and the brilliantly-titled ’Neon Dad’ show another, more mature side to their sound too, with the former sounding not unlike Luke Abbott’s woozy arpeggiators and melancholic synth washes, and the latter coming on like a long-lost Foals demo, back before they didn’t take themselves so seriously. It’s a perfect nugget of alt-pop sun bleached brilliance, which for a band like this, is the perfect curveball - it totally fits, but really shouldn’t, if you catch my drift.
Elsewhere, blistering lead single ‘Xed Eyes’, and the jaunty, almost (almost) reggae feel to ‘Acidic’ shows the band can still bring the fun and kick out the jams, with both aptly demonstrating why they were hot property in the mid 00’s punk funk/ DFA/ weirdo New Yoik scene. James Murphy would kill for ‘Xed Eyes’ by the way - for all his bluster, he could never let go into such unfettered joy the way Holy Fuck do here.
Things get a little dark and musty with the one-two punch of ‘House Of Glass’ and ‘Sabbatics’, both swapping the euphoric glee for a more heads-down, apocalypse groove affair with angry, swirling bass and trudging drums. And then… and then you get ‘Crapture’, which is Holy Fuck does Underworld - a 100mph headfirst dive into off kilter, distorted techno, all bludgeoning, warped melody and relentless kick drums. There’s even time for a whirly, Chemical Brothers style trippy synth line at the end, just to cap things off right.
It’s good to have you back, Holy Fuck, and it’s a relief to say that the six year wait for Congrats is most definitely worth it. For all their weirdo mangled machine noise, it feels like they’ve reached a beautiful plateau - a perfect crossroads between all their disparate elements, finely tuned and full of vigour.
Thu Jun 02 09:12:22 GMT 2016Tiny Mix Tapes 70
Holy Fuck
Congrats
[Innovative Leisure/Last Gang; 2016]
Rating: 3.5/5
Holy fuck, this band is still making music basically the same way they were back in 2004, and that’s not a bad thing at all. It’s a joy. Although I initially wrote them off as a gimmick based on the attention-grabbing name, 2010’s Latin wormed its way into my long-term playlists so suddenly and easily I didn’t question it. Songs like “SHT MTN,” “Stilettos,” and “Lovely Allen” hit a pleasure point so basic but also so immediately satisfying, arch crescendos of saturation and forever-in-the-fucking-pocket drums in a selfless, hyper modern funk. I still play those songs all the time, and Congrats seems primed to add a few to that party playlist.
While there are sung words in some Holy Fuck songs, and moreso than ever on Congrats, the vocals are low and blended in, filling reverb-heavy rooms, passing an indirect guidance to the mix. It’s a technique optimized on Latin and heavily employed on songs here like “Chimes Broken,” its monastic narrator-from-a-cave providing an appropriately psychedelic witness to experience. Meanwhile, they push the key features — the transitions, the distortion, the swing, the overworked melody — to emerge as sight lines that guide the listener, an alive and modular electronica, safely inhabiting a world with fixed, load-bearing beats before destroying it from within with patch adjustments. This created space is owed to lots of practice — that rhythm section is wound up like a watch — but also to a macro mindset, a band with sights set to a choice sync of sound, style, and shape that uses every second to earn its payoff.
“Chimes Broken” builds from sudden, unrelenting basses before striking black-and-white contrasts in cymbal timbres to break you in two. Its opening notes feel less like a blueprint than a heartbeat, a compulsive call the band is compelled to respond to, kraut loops growing in the hips. Much of the record travels in blown-out, saturated tones like this, resembling a bit more of their self-titled debut and sophomore LP than the more recent, sharper Latin, and reiterating a few of the Tonebank-Rhythm-Ko-esque grooves that we’ve heard before, albeit with a darker, occasionally shoegazy approach this time. But there are contrasts all over this record, and the sequencing keeps things fluid and lively between low, funky brooders (“Shivering”), mid-tempo rock (“Xed Eyes”) and dreamers like “Neon Dad,” which starts with faint lines like “consumes you, consumes me too” and “someone else’s sunshine,” and drives full force into distorted waves of surf and psych.
“Tom Tom” creeps heavy like a T. Rex with lyrics about beady little eyes and executions, and “Acidic” is big beat gone bonkers, laced distortion crushing a carnival of comic euro-disco from the 80s that mercifully diverts later into something nice. “House of Glass,” in both name and design — those opening, window-shattering bomb drops — feels like a post-Death Grips take on broody electro-rock, and “Caught Up” reminds me of peak ChemBros psych-arpeggio-tronica, with requisite crescendo. But as I place these songs on a spectrum of references, I also have to acknowledge the quality and form with which they reframe those similar elements, how they pounce on these shared points of inspiration and extract only the most infectious melodies, the phenomenal moments, and rebuild them in painstaking synchronicity, putting the unshakable Holy Fuck-ness of their focus in full view. Congrats to that.
01. Chimes Broken
02. Tom Tom
03. Shivering
04. Xed Eyes
05. Neon Dad
06. House of Glass
07. Sabbatics
08. Shimmering
09. Acidic
10. Caught Up
Pitchfork 66
The best instrumental acts make it easy for you to imagine what their frontperson might be like, if they had one. Explosions in the Sky would undoubtedly feature an earnest, heart-clutching romantic—it’s not surprising they’re as much of an influence on emo’s 4th wave as American Football. Russian Circles would present as a burly, stoic, type and even without Tyondai Braxton, Battles maintained the impish, playful charm of his vocals from Mirrored. Holy Fuck are tougher to get a read on: They were arguably electro-punk subversives at the outset; they’ve toured with M.I.A., and appeared on the Billboard Dance chart, and since 2010’s Latin, Graham Walsh has recorded Canadian acts that sound nothing like each other or Holy Fuck (METZ, Alvvays, Preoccupations). Although they actually emphasize vocals on Congrats, it’s somehow even harder to figure out what Holy Fuck is trying to express.
While Latin was crisp and kinetic, Congrats seems to take on at least some of the post-punk griminess of Walsh’s production charges. The bloodthirsty opener “Chimes Broken” emphasizes rumbling toms over snares, undulating bass over abrasive treble; first single “Tom Tom” batters the vocals in delay and echo. It’s notably similar to the fluorescent, toxic murk Liars oozed on Mess, rudimentary electronics and tribal rhythms given a high-end production sheen.
Above all else, Holy Fuck are a rhythm band, and much of Congrats has them circling back to where they started in 2005, i.e., a dance-punk band in a literal sense, trying to approximate electronic music with live instrumentation (and some non-instruments), to be as pummeling as they are danceable. Congrats is a record that rarely lets up, but there’s a sense of humor creeping in somewhere, mostly in the titles—on “Neon Dad,” they imagine themselves as a musclebound chillwave act and the synth-bass of “Caught Up” is a sincere homage to early-'00s DFA.
Holy Fuck never sound out of their element on Congrats—the most surprising addition is an acoustic guitar on the “Shimmering” interlude. But even at less than a minute, “Shimmering” somehow exposes the ultimate issue with Congrats and perhaps Holy Fuck as an enterprise. It’s not so much that “Shimmering” is the first time Congrats repeats itself—as a reprise of the earlier “Shivering,” that’s completely intentional. But as one of the final tracks, there’s the assumption that Congrats is meant to be consumed as a whole, that it has some kind of sonic narrative. Congrats isn’t incoherent in its diversity, it just never seems to build on itself—the record lacks a definitive peak, and most of the individual tracks tend to just state their main idea fairly early on. Mostly, it’s tough to specify what exactly makes Holy Fuck special or innovative at this late stage in their career, or what they're trying to do with this project besides keep things moving. Of course, that’s a high calling by itself, and maybe Holy Fuck is just the lifesaver who shows up to the party with ice and cups: though it’s functional, Congrats is still fun.
Correction: Due to a tracklisting change, an earlier version of this review misidentified the song “Caught Up” as “Crapture.” It has been amended.
Wed Jun 01 05:00:00 GMT 2016