Roadwork from Paramour by Band Of Holy Joy
Paramour is a flaming comet, devastating and mature, confident and proud. This is what happens when you live to feel the power of life and that you have no choice but contain that force through the structures of a song. Paramour clocks in at just over 30 minutes – nothing extraneous, not a word, note or texture wasted, the very definition of poetry. This is a song-cycle with a loose narrative thread- a piece of sonic cinema with beginning, middle and end: life, love, loss, redemption, no redemption. Band of Holy Joy on this outing sound like the crew of the Flying Dutchman after being permanently marooned in a lost New York.
Band Of Holy Joy have mutated endlessly since their origin as a kind of trashbin industrial folk collective, through early experiments in an intensely poetic form of ambient postpunk, to near chart-contenders on a then-failing Rough Trade, free of bitterness but with greater heart… and more recently onward to a series of albums of gently anthemic social culture and political critique.