News / / 14.06.13

JAMES HOLDEN

THE INHERITORS (Border Community)

17/20

It’s always the way with much-vaunted comebacks (and 2013 appears to be a vintage year): fear of letdown smothers hype. No one wants a favourite back catalogue tarnished, and often “that long-awaited album” leaves such a nasty stain. The risks weigh heavy not just on the audience, but on the procrastinating artist. The lengthier the interval, the higher the stakes.

Seven long years stretch between James Holden’s debut album, The Idiots Are Winning, and its follow-up, The Inheritors. Thankfully, he has successfully averted tumbleweeds, but he’s also taught us in the process that it helps to veer wildly off course.

The first thing to say is that this isn’t really dance music. Unlike Idiots…, a lean amalgam of modern techno punch and melodious leftfield glitch, The Inheritors is earthy, expansive and wistful. From the get-go, it pitches a Gaelic drone and acoustic drum patters (in Rannoch Dawn) against a resonating synth that could just as easily be a cello. And surprisingly, this isn’t just a quirky intro: across 80-odd minutes, there is barely a kick drum sampler in sight, let alone a four-to-the-floor beat.

Instead, the album drifts meditatively between the folk, post-rock, ambient electronica, and (particularly pronounced) kraut rock influences that are regular features of Holden’s DJ sets. Until now, these have served only as reference points for his Border Community releases.

Caterpillar’s Intervention is a primeval dance that owes its saxophone cacophony to Acoustic Ladyland or Radiohead’s The National Anthem. The following track, Sky Burial, sounds menacingly musty, like a horrible moth hatching from a giant cocoon. The Illuminations then softens the mood with a heavily compressed synth blur that drips tears of low-fi melancholy.

Repeating harmonies in Delabole and Blackpool Late Eighties both come close to touching the sublime, while The Inheritors and Renata show Holden’s ongoing knack for a synth hook – if he were to opt for a facile return to mainstream dance music.

Yet it’s high-brow stuff and he lets us know it, with references to Circles of Fifths and even, in the final track, a so-called Tierce de Picardie, resolving a minor song onto a major chord. All the while, he deftly explores the relationship between acoustic and electronic sounds through mixing real-world samples with synths.

That said, synthesisers dominate too much, usually at the expense of percussion: sometimes the album lacks punch, its flaccid rhythms harking back excessively to early Four Tet or Boards of Canada. His habit of constant synth repetition, with endless scribbles of distortion and other FX also becomes wearing after a time. Nowadays, it’s all about house and techno, and perhaps Holden forgets this at his peril.

More likely though, he doesn’t mind doing his own thing. Globetrotting DJ Holden hasn’t exactly been living in a cave since 2006: he’s just followed his convictions, however they manifest themselves. Many contemporaries could do worse than to inherit this wisdom.

 

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Words: Nick Johnstone

jamesholden.org

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