Holy Sons :: Puritan Themes
Photo: Mark Pettit
Imagine crate-digging in the deep, dark catacombs of rural Ohio in the early to mid-1980s at your favorite stomping ground, hoping to stumble across something that would absolutely blow you and your friend’s already melting minds. With punk rock continuing to shape the subconscious of the youth, the radical relics of the hippie movement still linger in the anarchic atmosphere like some spiritual smoke effortlessly exhaled from the lysergical lungs of a generation that has since cashed in, an old head behind the counter hands you an album that radiates with melodic mystery. For the last 6 or 7 years, your old man has schooled you on the tonal teachings of songwriting masters such as Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Cat Stevens, more specifically his 1975 classic “Numbers,” but your cosmic circle of pot-smoking, stamp-licking freakazoid friends desired something a little more irresistibly intense, darker, and mercilessly metaphysical. Still in the shrink, preserved in time like some prehistoric insect submerged in ancient amber, sporting a bright orange price tag from a previous record store in the far right-hand corner, you rush home on your Raleigh Rapide Touring Road Bike, clutching the dusty specimen tightly under your arm, dodging the neighbor’s dickhead dog, as you hop off your two-wheeled machine just in time to meet the steps leading to the front door. You dare initiate a conversation with your parents, their eyes remain glued to the TV that’s playing a Saturday afternoon marathon of MacGyver, as you quickly grab a Cherry Cola Slice from the fridge, and head downstairs to your personal paradise located in the dark dungeon of the basement.
“It’s an imaginary take on if Cat Stevens had smoked a ton of salvia and taken a much darker route within the world of dense, storytelling songwriting.”
Photo: Casey Proctor
When he’s not conquering the tour circuits with OM and Grails, or splintering the autonomy of the airwaves with his podcast Drifter’s Symphony, you can usually find Amos embracing his most challenging platform yet, his long-running solo project Holy Sons. It’s been over three decades since the veteran trailblazer first established this DIY machine of melody madness, and nearly half a decade since his last record, “Raw And Disfigured,” was released on Thrill Jockey. While bridging the gap between outsider folk and a reverse-engineered Lou Reed, Holy Sons has acted as this prolific vessel for Amos’s brilliantly blistering songwriting experiments, and the intensity of intimacy throughout its multiple record release run. Where the eager edge of the forbidden forests of the Pacific Northwest meets the chipped stone walkways that lead up to the hivemind of the multi-instrumentalist, producer, and all-around genius of his generation’s doorway, you can hear the feverish fragments of his 17th studio album “Puritan Themes” leaking through the splintered slits from the outside walls as you press your cold, numb ear against the door for further inspection.
Photo: Mark Pettit
Set for release on Halloween day, the album faithfully fractures the esoteric essence of religious recommendations by severing the main vein connected to pop culture pollution. If you want any liberation or marked-down freedom, you have to work for it, and Amos has done that in spades. Throughout the album’s lyrical landscape, listeners can expect the unexpected as its creeping contents remain in the darkness only to pull you into its elevated emptiness with swift strength and dormant energy with tracks like “Radio Seance,” “Raw & Disfigured,’ “Edge of the Bay,” and the album’s haunting opener. Balancing on this antique tightrope of romance and carefully curated chaos, while simultaneously being cut on the other side by a masked maniac whose features feel familiar yet mysterious, you can feel the meditation in between the tracks like the calm before a storm. Amos’s mind is endlessly brilliant, iconically intense, and universally uninterrupted as he effortlessly exercises his demons.
