Mess & Noise

Wednesday, 07 October 2009 20:34

This single from The Holy Sea’s forthcoming second album arrived in my letterbox with one of the wordiest press releases I’ve ever encountered. In it, the band stresses their own artistic ambitions, literary allusions and obsession with Australia’s colonial history. Such extensive baggage could easily weigh down the actual music with heightened expectations, especially since they reference such heavyweights as Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector (on ‘Bad Luck’) and the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee (on ‘King Of Palm Island’). Not exactly your average pop fare.

The Holy Sea then walk a tightrope in their songs; their grandiose, sweeping instrumentation providing perfectly-crafted, tastefully polished backing for Henry Skerritt’s unceasing streams of declamation. ‘Bad Luck’ is charged with nervous energy. Electric guitars and piano clamour for supremacy in the mix over a skittering drumbeat that explodes in a flurry of snare drum rolls when the tension becomes too much.

Not unlike The Drones’ Gareth Liddiard, Skerritt has mastered the art of pushing the songs along with his forceful vocal delivery and phrasing, constantly threatening to get ahead of the beat and thereby accentuating the urgency of the music. The singer’s very identifiably Australian inflection reinforces the point that they don’t need to look overseas for inspiration. Being Perth natives, The Holy Sea sit somewhere between the scabbiness of The Drones’ blues and The Triffids’ more restrained lyricism, but they inhabit this place with a conviction and authority which marks them as a band with a distinctive vision.

What is refreshing is that The Holy Sea don’t shy away from taking themselves and their art seriously in a pop-cultural climate that values artifice and superficiality over sincerity and passion. This may mark them as outsiders, but I have a feeling that in the long run, the voices that will constitute our artistic legacy will belong to the likes of Skerritt and The Holy Sea.

There are a lot of different facets that make up our contemporary society, and it’s good to be reminded occasionally that there are still writers and musicians who are not afraid to delve deep into our cultural subconscious and the fraught history of this country. To do this within the tainted medium of pop music is one of the bravest things I can think of.

René Schaefer
Mess and Noise