Holy Sons: Dread

Under the Holy Sons banner, Emil Amos creates the kind of music that is like therapy for the life damaged.

Misunderstood and cast off from the masses as some loss-leader indie trope, Amos has spent a career applying the blowtorch to the status quo. Amos’ incessant shunning from the inner circles of songwriting alumni is just fuel to the fire of the Holy Sons story; one that is arguably the most captivating since the turn of the century.

Adopting the same ethos from his other and perhaps more renowned projects, Grails, Lilacs & Champagne and OM, the rules are this: there are no rules. Where the Holy Sons tale is concerned, Amos has slaved away, conjuring up the kind of outlaw balladry that feels like it’s been written for your ears only.

Dread is the latest lightning bolt from the storm clouds; an odds-and-ends compilation that celebrates live versions from some of the project’s vital moments, with several rarities and never-released-before numbers scattered in between.

Dread Zone: In Conversation with Emil Amos

One of the key facets of Holy Sons is Amos’ ability to seemingly make cover versions his own. In some perverse way, the live versions of his own songs on Dread could be considered the same. Seen and heard through an alternative lens, that existential burden is explored at new depths that reveals new meaning. It’s a feat very few artists have achieved, but one should’nt be surprised in Amos’ case. After all this one of the many facets of the Holy Sons remit. One that is peerless. One that is frightening. One that consists of long roads that splinter off to new paths, and Amos has never been afraid to explore them.

With the majority of these songs performed and recorded between 2000 and 2010, Amos tinkers and tweaks with the aesthetic of these earlier works. The results overhang into the project’s next chapter where Amos effortlessly shifts from the freeing principals of lo-fi to embracing his outsider leanings ever more during the next period which would spawn The Fact Facer, In the Garden and Fall of Man.

There’s no better example than opening gambit, Bed of Nails II and later with the sunken gloom of Pleasure Center. Cuts written in 2010, which both occupy the same the realm where Amos would deliver his most underrated and one of his best albums, Survivalist Tales.

With More Therapy, Amos offers the first of serval live acoustic performances. Stripped to the bare bones, like the stirring version later in Boil it Down, Amos descends further into the abyss, as these skeletal sketches reveal a new poignant force. On the former, he sings, “Sometimes when I’m lonely I’ll do anything I can / To get the blood pumping in my veins again“). There is no other songwriter on the planet who delivers hammer blows through minimalism like Amos.

Meanwhile, Holy Sons’ most celebrated cuts in The Feral Kid and Gnostic Device sees Amos shifting from the studio to live band mode; the inflections of Floydian prog the maze-like psychedelia of Can adding new dimensions to songs that initially felt more like marginal folk laments than mind-altering kraut-rock statements.

The title track is effectively the hallmark card of the release. A lost single from Decline of the West III, it feeds into the premise of what Holy Sons is. An exploration on existentialism and the celebration of the underdog. Reaching that ultimate end point by any means necessary, simply because there is no other option.

It dovetails with another rarity, Yellowed Pages, which hits with an immediacy like no other track on Dread. With a Byrdsian chime, Amos cloaks it in the same dread that makes Holy Sons experience what it is. In this instance, he infiltrates the core of AM classicism, not only bastardising it, but also recreating the freedom that radio once brought and the embers it can stir.

Corridors of Power: 20 Years with Grails

So too with Failure Wish Rising. Ripped apart from its former guise, this live rendition is something of a campfire concern that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Raw & Disfigured.

Amos has recounted how this song set the tone for the project. With vignettes like, “There’s something about this old skin / Making it like my jail ever since I was a child” and “If you know the truth of the witching ways, you’ve got to stare into the fire / Of unsatisfied desires crying for your little self”, it’s not difficult to understand its impact. Juxtaposing these marrow-deep confessions with a line like, “My love was bigger than a big old Cadillac”, once again, it gives us insight into how fundamental AM radio and classic songwriting is to the Holy Sons core.

Finishing with a cover of Neil Young’s Dance is fitting. Another live acoustic recording from 2005, and as he’s always done, Amos weaves his own interpretation and aesthetic through the song to essentially make it his own.

From the acoustic and electric echoes of the live arena to the studio recordings, for those not familiar with the Holy Sons oeuvre, Dread isn’t the worst place to start. Like an excerpt into each chapter of this enthralling story, while compilations may be deemed as surplus in some quarters, their value holds a great weight in others. And for the perennial underdog that is Emil Amos, Dread is yet another gateway that leads to an artistic metropolis that should be celebrated far more than it is.

Dread is out now. Purchase from Bandcamp.