When writing about the first, eponymously titled, Holy Family album, I commented:

One of my favourite books of the last few years was ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke (published in 2004, but I was late to the party), a beguiling and unsettling novel which wonderfully described a world of shifting reality and surreal happenings. It was something which was brought to mind when listening to this new album by The Holy Family. It is a fascinating listen, particularly in the way that, once you are within this double album, it does not really feel as if there is a beginning or an end.

https://fragmentedflaneur.com/2021/06/23/rare-random-recent-release-round-up/

I only read this after being well into listening to this follow-up release, but the word ‘unsettling’ had already come up for me once again. This was not in a particularly negative sense but in the way in which it jiggles the status quo like sand when shaken up in water… your mind becomes a little more cloudy and the certainty becomes less clear.

This is clearly a device that it inherent in The Holy Family’s music as I then quickly discerned from the notes for the album:

‘Go Zero’ follows up the British group’s widely praised self-titled debut from 2021 and – says foundational member David Jason Smith – “is based on a hypothetical theory that there is no such thing as ‘the future’. We are continually moving forward into our past until we arrive at our birth – creation – the Tree Of Knowledge… or ‘Going Zero’, as I’ve termed it.” 

https://theholyfamilyuk.bandcamp.com/album/go-zero

This concept is based on ‘Vorrh’, the trilogy of fantasy novels by cult British author Brian Catling, who died in 2022 while ‘Go Zero’ was being assembled, and suggests a sense of disorientation similar to that found in Susanna Clarke aforementioned book, except the key sense of discombobulation is temporal rather than spacial.

By it’s nature, therefore, it is difficult to describe the feelings that this album evokes since they are inherently unresolved… nevertheless this is excellent music so I’m going to give it a go…

I think that the first thing to say is that the sense of being a little lost here stretches into the genre… with musicians from such broad backgrounds (they have all been in multiple bands before) they is no one style or approach… which makes the whole thing both challenging and satisfying at the same time…

The album begins in a suitably mysterious manner, with ‘Crawling Out’, a track that immediately plunges you into that dark morass of uncertainty… there’s no pissing about here… this sudden mood-altering beginning added to that sense of disorientation and you find yourself wondering what were are crawling out from and, perhaps of more concern, what are we crawling out to. As you would expect there is no resolution to this…

…just the second track ‘Bad Travelling’ which takes the whole concept to the next level. At this point we are already deep in the Holy Family chaotic universe… where nothing is as it seems… this is one of those tracks which could have come out at any point in the last few decades… and yet remains absorbing and fascinating… it is a sound that really draws you in… a psychedelic number which grabs your mind and drags it deeper… the only thing is, where too?

After that ‘Chalky’s Eyes’ is able to take advantage of the psychology that its predecessors have engendered… there are some lovely melodies that hit wonderfully on the rawness of the mind… and despite the uncertainty this track somehow reassures you that everything is alright… the journey might be strange but there is little to worry about… it starts to feel like your spiritual guide (there are lots of similar concepts in religious and other cultural traditions) which is very much a quality I like in my music.

As the otherworldly vocals fade… the piano at the beginning of ‘The Watcher’ comes in… gradually vocals and other layers of sound are gently brought in… it feels that you are in the middle section of a ritual now (a common theme for me I know) you really feel far from home… the word that comes to mind on this occasion is ‘celestial’… but really it could be different visualisations… the key point is that the focus is sharp and wherever you have let this emblematic music take you it feels like a ‘good trip’…

’Hell Born Babel’ feels lighter… as if some landmark has been reached… it has the feel of a celebration… a feast after a rite of passage… perhaps, in the context of Catling’s writings, a celebration of life just before our birth… however you want to frame it this is a joyous song that comes just at the right time.

The rest of the album consists of a three-part ‘Go Zero Suite’… the first part of which feels like a a brief incantation before the band really hit their stride and fly off into deep psychedelic territory with a terrifically paced number which feels as complex as it is genre defying… I found myself getting lost in its lanbrynthine sound… while the rest of the album felt considered this feels like The Holy Family off the leash and really going for it… this goes on for over ten minutes and is just filled with joy…

…and as we hit the final part of the ‘Suite’ we are confronted with a drone which suggests that something truly transformative is about to happy… it is a soft reflective piece which does very much feel like the end… but also, by the same token, a new beginning… either way it is a stunning way to finish the album as we head for the light… deposited out into our ‘reality’ in a much softer manner than the disjunction of the beginning.

This is another terrific set from The Holy Family, which in some ways builds on the first album but, for me, takes it to another level… it’s a truly mind-altering piece of psychedelia which really opens up the brain to other possibilities and ideas…

’Go Zero’ is out now on Rocket Recordings.

-o0o-

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