‘From humble beginnings to humble ends, turns out I don’t amount to anything.’
Holding Absence are a force of nature, after conceding the greatest mistake of their lives, we are now fine tuning The Noble Art of Self Destruction, a welcome return with album number three and I’m going to set my life clock to collateral damage. Press play and I instantly feel that At The Drive-In are in the room. The introduction has the Hardcore feel before launching into ‘Head Prison Blues’. I love the lyric ‘my head’s been a prison, nobody should live in’, it speaks volumes, and sums up the feeling of an entire populace I would reckon.
Get the ‘Scissors’ and start cutting away the excess, the unnecessary flesh and fat, that will not be needed on the journey forward. Let go of the baggage, lighten the load so you can grow and move forward.
The exquisitely tuneful ballad ‘Honey Moon’ reminds me of – wait for it- The Tiger Lillies and ‘Alone With The Moon’ it’s got the hypnotic vibes of staring at the moon, although portraying a different scenario but still feeling overcome with emotion, be it joy or sadness.
The band are Lucas Woodland -vocals, Scott Carey – guitars, Benjamin Elliot – bass and Ashley Green on drums who were crafted in Cardiff in 2015 and have since been providing the soundtracks of our lives.
Fantasise, metastasise, you have the knife, a semblance of a life, just wait for the right moment as the events of your life roll by. The raw cacophony of ‘Her Wings’ injects a charge that is volatile and electric, neatly fusing the catchy compositions with the heavier and crispy around the edges riffery.
A tale of hidden depths is in ‘These New Dreams’ what horrors lie in wait for the unsuspecting as we learn that ‘every beautiful fruit is forbidden; you only showed your colours once bitten’. Harsh as it may sound the story of a wolf in sheep’s clothing is very real.
There are basically five rites of passage in life, they are birth, adulthood, marriage, eldership and ancestorship, within these timeframes we are ‘Liminal’ or in a transition phase, whether that is good or bad will depend on the depth of life’s misery ladle, it gives me languishing in Purgatory vibes too.
From the caverns of Hell to the plateaus of Heaven, the echoes of ‘nobody cares’ reverberate around your head and exit out into the night. Whether, here present or in absentia, it will be death, nonetheless, until then I will hold your absence as a gift, a promise that we will defy the odds and live to see another day.
We tumble over the finish line with an attempt to free ‘The Angel In The Marble’ and we hear the album title, we hack away at ourselves trying to do better, trying to be better, be the sum of our humanity and our manifestations, we see it all, live it all, breathe it all and hope to emerge triumphant, a credit to our endeavours and our abilities. An instruction in self-destruction courtesy of Holding Absence, our noble friends.
Azra Pathan
Holding Absence – The Noble Art Of Self-Destruction out now.