HOLY FUCK
Deleter (Holy EF Music)
The company kept here by Holy Fuck, the Canadian four-piece now on to their fifth album, gives a small sense of the reach attempted here from what might once in the band’s early years have been a little underdeveloped EDM: British electro pop figure Alexis (Hot Chip) Taylor; US-based Australian art rock experimenter Angus (Liars) Andrew and Perth’s psychedelic rock chap de jour, Nicholas (Pond) Allbrook.
Taylor opens the album as guest vocalist on Luxe, a reverberating bit of mechanalia* which comes at you with a low level menace of impersonal sounds echoing back and forth, and machine waves rising and then subsiding before a Thom Yorke-like the-end-is-nigh murmuring sets up a climax that makes for insistent and thrilling dance that resolutely refuses to release you from that initial menace.
Andrew works almost as a ghost in the machine of the virtual title track, Deleters, his vocals tucked in behind the ‘80s synths and stentorian tone, letting the clashing sounds of nagging keyboards and high throb bass bring a wash of dark disco to proceedings. This is a song with momentum.
As for Allbrook, he can be found set adrift lysergically-high above the rolling synth bass, mid-pace drive and hands-in-the-air buoyant feel of Free Gloss which eventually, somehow seems to fall quite naturally into the electro/rock/dance melange which Pond, and of course Tame Impala, call home.
As enjoyable, and in some ways emblematic as these three tracks are though, they aren’t necessarily the best parts of Deleter. Apart from the dark rhythmic grind of San Sebastian and post-punk shape of the clubby Ruby, the shadowed Euro-pulse of Moment, which is both martial and flighty, dank underground and hot Texas club (imagine Butthole Surfers having come to Dusseldorf from San Antonio) is probably my favourite.
And even below them the big-arse bass and distortion overlays of No Error and its flipside, the spacey dream groove of Endless (which serves as the perfect WA-style psych entrée to Free Gloss) are enjoyable second tier contributors.
Pretty good return on investment I reckon.
* mechanalia is not a word? It is now