STREAM: “Yearlings Darlings” –
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STREAM: “Golden Sparklers” –
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Florida band Holopaw releases the “Golden Sparklers” 7″ single on Misra, a sneak peek at the band’s forthcoming fourth album, Academy Songs, Volume I — the A-side premiered a few weeks back via Pitchfork and the B-side premiered today via Under The Radar. The album is due on Misra on Jan. 15, 2013.
More About The Album
Academy Songs, Volume I, Holopaw’s Misra Records debut, takes the band to new levels. Through collaborations with Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock (Ugly Casanova) and releases via Sub Pop Records, frontman John Orth has honed his gift for lyricism, storytelling, and delivery. Now, backed by a variant possessing uncanny chemistry (complete with identical twin brothers), we’ve been graced with an unparalleled, breathtaking Holopaw album.
Over a ten-song cycle, the close quarters of an all-boys preparatory academy, and the world beyond its “ivied walls,” become the sites of devotion, betrayal, communion (or near-communion), and abject loneliness. The joys and thrills and dangers of both discovery and transgression are detailed. “The rising and falling of their little lives” is illuminated in stunning imagery.
Hips to hips and knees to knees / the heaving hills / the swollen seas / the hollows and the frozen peaks. / Fingers smell of tangerines. / Slow curve rivulets / the see-see-sawing of our breaths / the loamy, sticky in-betweens / the ticklish bubbling underneath.
The album maps, rather vigorously, the physical and emotional terrain of its young characters’ lives. Throughout, it finds them both reveling together and exiled from one another.
Golden sparklers / flares lobbed into the dark / fountains of embers / sucked into the night. / Wipe the sweat from the window to watch the firework display. / Roman candles arched over the lake.
Theboyshadallbeensent to the far side of the lake / one held back until the fever breaks / sweating through his nightshirt / orchids curling into bloom / volunteer sleeps in the corner of the room / “Pardon me, sir. Sorry to wake you.” / “Respectfully, I say, this fever is not breaking.” / “There’s a war I’m steady losing on the far side of the lake” / “to a little dark horse who’s steady rising through the ranks.”
Jeremy Scott drove his Civil Defense Studio down from Brooklyn to record Academy Songs in a St. Augustine beach house. Serendipitously, the physical intimacy of the experience seemed to mirror the boys academy detailed in song. Holopaw lived, worked, cooked, and swam together. Their world consisted of playing music and cutting paths from beach house to beach and back again. Long days recording were celebrated over homemade horchata, fish tacos, and a different flavor of hand-churned ice cream each night (ginger lime and peach brown sugar standing out as favorites). A night swim would commence, followed by recording into the dark and light of morning.
Holopaw’s Patrick Quinney summarized the experience upon returning: “You know that feeling you have after swimming and getting a lot of sun, where you seem to experience every little thing-food, rest, humor, music-as a kind of deep physical and spiritual luxury? We have been asked by a surprising number of people if the recording got ‘beachy’ out there: in the sense that we made it entirely in an atmosphere of that physical and spiritual luxury, I would have to say that it did. I certainly hope that everything that sounded good or seemed like a great idea at the time will continue to do so after the last of the sand is out of our shoes.”
Holopaw
Academy Songs, Volume I
(Misra)
Street Date: Jan. 15, 2013
Track List:
1. Academy
2. Golden Sparklers
3. Diamonds
4. Bedfellows Farewell
5. Dirty Boots He Don’t
6. We Are The Virgin Snow
7. Discotheque
8. Infidels
9. Chapperelles Interlude
10. The Lights From The Disco
11. Golden Years
Holopaw
Golden Sparklers 7″
(Misra)
Street Date: Nov. 13, 2012
A: Golden Sparklers
B: Yearlings Darlings
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