Australian duo Holy Holy, made up of Timothy Carroll and Oscar Dawson, create rich sonic palettes that can be absorbed on multiple levels – such are the songs, layers and textures – this making the aesthetic of their latest album so very appropriate: PAINT, with the album artwork featuring an intensely emotive piece by Newcastle based expressionistartist James Drinkwater.
However, despite this high concept basis, PAINT is one of the best guitar albums to be released by an Australian artist in recent years. Dawson who plays the six-string absolutely shreds.
“Oscar is the guitarist in the band and he is really talented, he has a lot of different moves up his sleeve: he has a really incredible palette of soundscapes and sounds that you wouldn’t necessarily know are guitar parts,” says Carroll about his collaborator.
“On this record we definitely made a lot of room for his voice.”
However, it isn’t just Dawson’s voice[he means guitar, if you were confused] that there was room made for on PAINT. As opposed to their debut, When The Storms Would Come, which was a songwriting collaboration between only Dawson and Carroll, the demoing process for PAINT included their touring band of Ryan Strathie on drums, in-house producer Matt Redlich on keyboards, and bassist Graham Ritchie.
Carroll is posed the proposition that the recording process for PAINT was more fluid because it was written as a band. “I think that is definitely true, it’s such a different process constructing a whole song and then wrapping a band around it, as opposed to being in a room and seeing where the song goes, being lead by the drum and the bass.”
The thoughtful musician muses that although the more collaborative approach was enlightening, when it was just Dawson and himself there was a quiet magic at work, “Maybe there is intimacy and a starkness that can come out of the former writing style but the latter is so much fun and allows us so much more expression and colour in the work, I am really excited by these new songs and they are really fun to play live and they were fun to record.”
With the choice to capitalise the album’s title PAINT Holy Holy are very much using it in the verb sense of the word. The band’s aforementioned collaborator James Drinkwater took this one step further with PAINTing To PAINT, in which four local Australian artists, carefully selected by Drinkwater, will take four songs lifted from the album and create art inspired by what they hear. Accompanied by Holy Holy music, the process of creation, from blank canvas to completion, will be filmed and edited into four separate films by award-winning local Australian director, Charlie Ford (Courtney Barnett, Vance Joy). The first of this series is That Message, painted by Drinkwater himself.
In line with the philosophy communicated by Drinkwater’s very textured artwork and by the name of the album, is Holy Holy creating music for both entertainment but also meditation? Carroll digests this, stating, “It’s funny, you’re saying things that are kind of making me have realisations about what we’re doing.” That’s the point of talking about art isn’t it?
By Dan Watt
