All We Have Is Never

Description

Frustrated by the physical and logistical challenges keeping the band members from collaborating, they decided the best way forward for their second album, was at the residential Black Bay Studios on Great Bernera, a two hour plus ferry ride from anywhere. ‘The isolation of Black Bay was our salvation, a much-needed cleanse after a year of relentless misfortune’, reckons the band’s Peter Taylor. Taylor describes the Holy Scum approach jokingly as ‘No riffs’ yet this belies an ability to carve abstraction and minimalism into monolithic and ominous shapes. Whilst the band are as handy as ever with excoriating and ear-splitting experimentation – as on the feverish guitar scree that underpins the taut ‘Thieves’ – they also excel in a grittily vital charge as analogous to the ballsy kinetics of Fugazi and The Ex (the primal ‘I Am The Land’) as the overcast catharsis of Killing Joke and Voivod (the infectious ‘Witches’).

Tracklisting

Disc 1
1. Waves of Laughter – Holy Scum
2. These Hills – Holy Scum
3. Thieves – Holy Scum
4. Trying in Hell – Holy Scum
5. Liar – Holy Scum
6. I Am the Land – Holy Scum
7. Witches – Holy Scum
8. Just Tell Me How It Ends – Holy Scum
9. Twos and Threes – Holy Scum
10. Faces – Holy Scum
11. Like December – Holy Scum