The latest single from the soon to be released album Beauty Looking Back, Prince Gloom is a stripped back thing of beauty and further proof of Holy Matter’s ability to craft kaleidoscopic sound worlds that shimmer with nostalgic energies. Proof too that David Glasebrook’s Royal Oakie Records keep producing and releasing great music.
There’s so much space and reverb in this slow-paced, tropical-flavoured meditation – what sounds like snatched pockets of bird song ripple effervescently and a beautiful flute-evoking mellotron line warbles elegantly and evocatively as assorted gongs and bells chime in delicate textures. There are glorious details to the underlying pulsing rhythms, too, with cymbals crashing theatrically in echoing transcendence. A seaside-sounding organ churns, too, and subtly sampled glissando strings are woven deftly into the mix to further enhance the crackling, vintage atmospheres. Vocally it is as beautiful, longing and languorous as you would expect from Leanna Kaiser- here enhanced yet further by the ethereally added voice of Kate Bollinger. It makes sense that this was originally crafted as an almost bossanova piece as classical guitars craft deliberate, rhythmic shapes as the song builds. It’s a beautiful thing indeed.
It feels like an overused description but Kaiser’s music really is very visual – these soft edged sounds painting hazy yet tangible pictures in the mind – an imagined past cloaked in a memory-rich, meandering sense of yearning. You can close your eyes and be taken to another place – and it’s all done with such grace and seeming ease that you find it surreptitiously lulling you into its dream-like embrace. You will be hypnotised.
Holy Matter truly takes you to new places: let them do so again and again and again.
Written by M. A Welsh (Misophone)