ZURICH’S fine post-rockers HOLM have taken an unusual, calendrical approach to their forthcoming album, In Gardens; they’ve been revealing it at the steady rate of a track a month over the past year, with that project reaching completion with a final track in mid-January.
Which means, of course, that we’re but one track away from completion. And that penultimate track came to the world today: the slowly unfolding title track, “In Gardens” itself, a transporting piece all six-string resonance and pattering drums, which you can delight in herein.
We’ve previously rather loved the pastoral grandeur of “Our Days And Years” and the impressionistic “Flickering Leaves” on the band’s once-a-month journey, now nearing its culmination; check them out too to gain a real flavour of this Zurich outfit who understand the power and the beauty of allowing a song to unfold at a steady pace, envelop you slowly, much as with the much-missed Labradford.
Everything on In Gardens was recorded in one take in the band’s bunker studio, deep underneath Zurich’s central business district, thus ensuring an organic and humanistic warmth is preserved. This music flows, lives and breathes.
HOLM guitarist Dmitri Käch says: “‘In Gardens’ is an escape into evening colours. Out of the city, higher and higher, further and further away.
“The lights become an ocean, then little spots, and eventually, Earth is just a blue dot in space. Floating sound fragments echo, guitars rattle and chirp, the bassline spirals around itself, the drums hiss and pulse, and above it all, a melody floats weightlessly, occasionally shaken up by a meteor shower.” And it certainly is a flavour of post-rock to move you out beyond whatever’s chivvying you in your daily grind, And that, surely, is one of music’s noblest endeavours.
The band formed in 2018 and has no predetermined goals, except to share a musical and emotional journey. They say HOLM, named for the Norse word for an island, is a place to catch a fleeting glimpse of another truth, a location from which perspectives may change.
HOLM’s “In Gardens” is out on digital streaming platforms now via Quiet Love Records.
Connect with HOLM at their official website, at Bandcamp, and on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
