The first time I saw Holy Fuck perform was back in 2007 where they opened for !!! as part of the Myth Takes tour. It was two guys attacking a pair Dan Deacon-like equipment strewn card tables with the intensity of Victor Frankenstein bringing his creation to life. Like Frankenstein, they too have created a monster. Cobbling together keyboards, sequencers, effects pedals, toys and the occasional voice Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh attack sustain delay and release waves of sound to create dance music the hard way; by hand.
We were pretty much in awe of what was happening. It was a wall of sustained dance that would occasionally break out into song for a few minutes before vanishing back into a deep dark wave of funk. Joined onstage by a bassist and a drummer, we couldn’t do much more but just stare for the full set trying to take it all in. Is it a dance band if you don’t dance?
It doesn’t matter. After the show, I bought the EP and immediately began to proselytize for them. “You HAVE to listen to this madness!” Though Holy Fuck is predominately a band best experienced live, EP managed to trap the experience as songs bled into one another creating a singular experience made up of smaller songs.
Holy Fuck’s first album, LP, didn’t really capture this joy of performance. Each song was separated, trapped in the tesseract of track listing. It was more a collection of songs than an album. Latin, their newest album suffers from that to a degree, it not by much.
What Latin calls to mind is that this seems like Holy Fuck’s attempt to make a pure dance album. Gone are the head bopping tunes like “Lovely Allen” and they’ve been replaced with songs like “Red Lights,” “Stay Lit”, “SHT MTN” which all recalls late-period Chemical Breaks dance acts as they moved away from Big Beat’s “Hip Hop at 140 BPM” and began to incorporate more experimental psychedelic influences; still danceable, but rejecting the dance mainstream.
Though Latin is not a throwback album, as the last song on the track, “Russell X” sounds like something you’d find slotted into the more clued in Dubstep DJ sets with the punishing bass and Drag speed tempo along with more genre defying tracks like “Stilettos,” “Silva & Grimes” and the tinny toy sounds that make up “Latin America” provide as sweeping a tribute to its namesake as does Future Sound of London’s “Papua New Guinea.”
In short, if you enjoy electronic music, you will most likely enjoy this. If you like dance music, you will find the energy there to propel you forward in the night. If you are a DJ looking to break out of your beatport.com lifestyle, give this a shot. If LP and commercial success worried you, give this a listen. Latin holds up better on repeated listens than does anything since the EP release three years ago. Absolutely crucial summer listening. Though I hope that their next project will be a live album so that we can have a record of where they stand in their best environment.