Emil Amos’ Holy Sons mourn the demise of their last vestige of optimism with a quite definitively miserable fourth album, jam-packed with Portland, Oregon despair and futility. Good value!
With 13 sketches lasting a half-hour, its beauty is that somehow it avoids self-indulgence, each cameo crying, making Knut Hamsun look like Ken Dodd, then drifting politely away. Sliding between slurred whispers and a sighing falsetto, he reaches emotions the dreary latest Lambchop opus didn’t.
Between “anxiety”, “paranoia” and “compromise”, he peaks with, “I stare into the empty nothing left-just some dust, and some cold”.
Is this alt.country, or so bleak it’s genre-less? He craves relief, if only he could get up off his bed and walk. Makes On The Beach sound like “Beach Baby”.