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Product details
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Track Listings
| 1. Honey Bunny |
| 2. Alex |
| 3. Die |
| 4. Saying I Love You |
| 5. My Ma |
| 6. Vomit |
| 7. Just a Song |
| 8. Magic |
| 9. Forgiveness |
| 10. Love Like a River |
| 11. Jamie Marie |
Product Description
Review
Of course, Album was slow in places too, but it was punctuated by runaway curveballs like Morning Light, Big Bad Mean Mother F***er, and the unforgettable opener, Lust for Life. It was also messy, sounding like it had been recorded in different places by different producers, with varying standards of recording apparatus.
This is a much more cohesive creation, building on the polish of their Broken Dreams Club EP, but pushing into deeper, more contemplative waters. The San Francisco duo deals in sorrow and heartbreak - with Album this meant instinctual outpouring; on Father, Son, Holy Ghost it means the painstaking carving of an elegant musical landscape. It's lengthy, but the sensitivity of every guitar tickle and percussive touch, as well as main man Christopher Owens' spellbinding voice, means that it is rarely boring.
The album actually begins with a fairly raucous thrust - there's the bouncy, self-deprecating yet megalomaniacal Honey Bunny, and the galloping nod to early metal of Die. But with My Ma's heart-wrenching melancholia, we begin to plunge into Owens' private emotional world. Songs like Vomit plod along, occasionally giving way to controlled explosions, before plodding some more, like the ebb and flow of despair.
Even when Girls attempt to recover a jaunty pop aesthetic in Magic, the way Owens delicately mutters the words infects the song with vulnerability. Throughout, in fact, his voice is more self-possessed than on Album; instead of reckless exhalations of emotion, here the emotion's internalised, and conveyed with an eyes-closed sincerity.
Closer Jamie Marie - a grown-up cousin of Album's Lauren Marie - sounds like the very dead of night. Its beautiful, elegiac main riff winds along, wrapping around the fragile vocals before, in a final flourish, the drums sputter up alongside Bob Dylan-like keyboards. It's like you're draining your glass, taking a last spin on the dancefloor, and saying goodbye to all the stragglers in this desolate old blues-rock bar.
--Darren Loucaides
Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window
CD Description
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Customer Reviews
Its always nice to be suprised by an album and this ione did just that. From the nice gentle beginning of Honey Bunny it goes onto be a rich and expansive album. Well worth a punt!
At the time their resident genius Christopher Owens told Uncut that "it could have been "Pet Sounds" if they had decent equipment to record it on". In one sense it's a nice bit of bravado, but in another Owen is travelling a path within the 54 minute boundaries of "Father, son and holy ghost" which is almost peerless on the current rock music scene with a scale of ambition which is admirable and almost obscene. Equally the musical step up from their debut is huge and you wish that whatever source of inspiration Owens is drinking from that he would buy a round for some other bands far less blessed. Listen to the great folk gospel single "Vomit" and its starts off evoking Radiohead of the era of OK Computer but by the end almost reprises "The great gig in the sky" with a Clare Torry style fade out. It's a superb song although matched by the gently boiling melancholia of the nearly 8 minute long "Forgiveness" one of the loveliest drifting songs you will have heard in a long while which builds to a great climax and instant recourse to the repeat button. It is often the simplicity of this album that makes it so great, for example the slow rock n roll blues of "Love like a river" could have easily been written by John Lennon as Owens niftily recasts a universal melody, while "My Ma" calls to mind vintage Neil Young. Equally the poptastic "Hunny bunny" with its hint of surf rock inspired harmonies does not break no ground but its just great, while "Die" is polished glass indie rock which will commence by knocking the ducks off your wall and yet fades out sounding like a missing link to Pink Floyd's "Wish you were here". The closer "Jamie Marie" shows that Owens probably has a great solo album up his sleeve, a gentle Dylanesque lament which is the perfect lo fi end to proceedings, while the tightly strung opening guitar lines of the lengthy "Just a song" lead into a complex structure, a sort of modern aquatic nightsong.
On the evidence presented on the truly wonderful "Father, son, holy ghost" it is clear that Christopher Owens is a first class pop savant who has produced an album which the Irish Times has rightly argued has "countless depths to plumb and myriad layers to unravel". Thus before facing in the direction of 2012 pause and step back into 2011 for an untrammelled pleasure.
It is modern, but has a sense of the tradition of the music.
It is sensitive and rocking.
I can't stop replaying it. Read more
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