Holy Hail - Independent Pleasure Club

Genre experimental Publisher Kanine Records External Links Holy Hail MySpace

When young Americans, restless in the suburbs or the countryside, get the artistic itch, they do what Cat Hartwell did: they move to the Big City, and then they start trying a little too hard.  The biggest city of them all is New York City, of course, where they try harder than anybody.  Hartwell, who says she “fled to NYC” from the South with her DJ dreams “as soon as she could,” is the leader of Holy Hail, a dance-rock trio that—like much of the Big Apple’s huge population of ex-hicks, recovering suburbanites, and sundry red-state refugees—appears indecently concerned, even maniacal, about projecting a cool attitude.

The result of Holy Hail’s intense image-consciousness is that their promotional materials are a performance consistently more interesting than their music.  In a press kit they sent to Static along with their new album Independent Pleasure Club—due out November 11 on Kanine Records—the band members tout their hipster credentials as though they were dramatis personae from an early draft of Rent.  Joining guitarist Hartwell in her quest to put “lyrically potentcy [sic] back into pop music” are the “Bronx born union rep [sic]” and keyboardist Kevin Cooke and the “killer bassist” Michally Kaye, a “first-generation American of Indian-Croatian descent and daughter of a pentecostal [sic] preacher raised Jewish in Minneapolis.”

I wouldn’t care if Kaye were raised Shinto in Cheboygan, if she or any of her bandmates could sing.  That is my prime complaint: half-committed to melodies that are only halfway there, they sound like a chanting high-school cheerleading team.  Geopolitical high seriousness is meant to bail them out—the press kit says a “good portion of these tracks is strewn with political undertones”—but, alas, I couldn’t make out a word they were chanting, and of course “political undertones,” however you strew them, are not like the vitamin booster in a smoothie, which works even when you can’t taste it.  The first song, “Elemental,” is the Iraq War Song; the last song, “Backwater,” is the Hurricane Katrina Song.  If you buy this record, you can play Spot The Catastrophe in between with wiretapping, the environment, and more.

Dense as that wad of Kaye’s impressive biography may be, it’s nothing next to Holy Hail’s MySpace profile, where the band gives a list of its influences that’s even harder to parse.

Influences: The Fall, Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club, New Order, ESG, The B-52’s, X, Can, Fleetwood Mac, Sly and the Family Stone, The Band, Nas, Leadbelly, June and Johnny, The Doors, spirituals, southern soul, westward expansion, easterly winds, northern lights, stoners, b-boys, b-girls, trailer folk, gypsies, dub.

Since not many followers of Nas, here or in the hereafter, are on a first-name basis with the late Mr. and Mrs. Cash, it’s reasonable to ask: how is this going to work out, exactly?  Will the polyrhythms of Talking Heads’ African drum section derail the freight train of the Tennessee Three?  What happens to the taste of the Band’s greasy home cooking when you throw in the Doors’ magic mushrooms?  How do “trailer folk” and “gypsies” feel about the Moog synthesizer?

The surprise answer is that the list is a hoax and the joke is on you.  None of the great artists above have any discernible influence at all on Independent Pleasure Club, which is just another entry in a genre that, distressingly, won’t die.  Call it Gorillaz dung: you just fling the European dance music of the eighties at the American hip-hop of the nineties.

The only explanation I can come up with is that Holy Hail has some looser understanding of artistic influence, so that when they say that they are influenced by Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, they mean that there is at least one man and one woman in their group, and when they say that they are influenced by Sly and the Family Stone and the B-52s, they mean, again, that both sexes have representation, and when they say that they are influenced by Tom Tom Club—the one-hit curiosity formed by married Talking Heads sidewoman Tina Weymouth and sideman Chris Frantz—they mean that they sound a lot like Tom Tom Club, only worse.