Are hope and despair diametrically opposed? It’s one of many questions one might ponder while listening to this second album from LA’s Holy Wars. Another is: is it okay to enjoy a record you know to be born from someone else’s pain?
In the band’s recent K! Cover Story, in which singer Kat Leon used the term ‘trauma baiting’ to describe her music, here inspired by the death of her sister, while adopting our suggestion of ‘misery porn’, so it’s a situation she’s aware of. Regardless, it’s hard not to be affected by this record in a primal way. It is excellent.
Much like the process of grief, these 12 tracks shapeshift, with their moods and dynamics darting unpredictably. Even so, O Death, I Feel Everything and Proof Of Existence never feel jarring or disjointed, but like organic detours upon detours through a mind aflame with love and loss, while pondering, in the wake of this exquisite agony, what the point of it all is.
Such a question needs suitably dramatic music, which there’s no shortage of here, occasionally tipping into the overblown, but rarely being less than totally engaging. This has been described as a concept album, though it’s not one in the traditional, fusty sense. It is, however, a record unified by themes that take the listener on a journey that ends at a markedly different place to where it began.
If that makes it a concept album, so be it. However you define it, Holy Wars have clearly upped the ante in making it – be it the heavy moments (Kill The Light), the heavenly ones (I.F.O.Y.G.), or the place where they intersect (Shadowalker).
