What a brilliant career arc David Holmes is experiencing. The 54-year-old Belfast musician, producer, composer and DJ started out almost 40 years ago spinning vinyl, graduating a short time later to running club nights Sugar Sweet and Shake Yer Brain. By 1995 he had released his debut album, This Film’s Crap Let’s Slash the Seats, and by the end of that decade had started providing soundtrack and score work for the film-maker Steven Soderbergh (a collaboration that remains secure and successful to this day).
Blind on a Galloping Horse is a different kettle of slippery fish altogether, however, as it soundtracks a far more personal side of Holmes, a part not hired to create bespoke music to sit alongside scenes in a movie. As such, it shares deeply considered connections with The Holy Pictures, his song-driven 2008 album, which introduced Holmes as a bone fide songwriter at ease with textured sonic brush strokes (the album sleeve announced that all of the songs were “painted and produced by David Holmes”) as he poignantly paid tribute to his parents, Sarah and Jack.
There is another connection: the music outline for The Holy Pictures revolves around wraps of pop, rock, stoned-psychedelia and Krautrock. Blind on a Galloping Horse features a similar template but with one crucial addition: the American singer Raven Violet, his goddaughter. (Violet’s parents, Keefus Ciancia and Jade Vincent, are Holmes’s frequent collaborators in Unloved, his much-admired side project.)
While Violet rightly receives a “featuring” credit for providing a wondrous vocal sequence from start to finish – her voice, Holmes says, is “like Michelle Phillips from the Mamas and Papas, but with attitude” – it is the Belfast man’s dynamic songs and soundscapes that deliver one impressive surprise after another. Lyrically, there is much to chew on, as Holmes focuses on the slow decay of decency, the turmoil of war and his own mental-health struggles. Dotted throughout the album are voice notes from Afghan and Ukrainian refugees and a Palestinian ambulance driver, while on the lengthy opening track, When People Are Occupied Resistance Is Justified, the music is a push-and-pull soundtrack of anxiety and relief.
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The virtuosity is maintained with the roll-call of Necessary Genius (“I believe in Samuel Beckett ... I believe in Sinéad O’Connor”), the twinkling instrumental Agitprop 13, and the title track, which, like much of the album, acts as a pulsating clarion call for what Holmes refers to as “dreamers, misfits, radicals and outcasts”. The brilliant career continues with one of the most considered and triumphal albums of the year.
