As indicated by the cover art depicting a panned out shot of rippled sheets on a bed haunted by absent bodies, Manchester-born producer Holy Other's debut album Held builds on the bedroom territory of previous EP With U to reveal a bigger, messier story. Where With U was situated in the muddled aftermath of a relationship, Held is deep in the clutch of one. Or, more precisely, concerned with the natural push-pull impossibility of oneness.
Having spent much of the latter half of 2011 and beginning of 2012 performing with a veil over his head, Holy Other stands naked on Held. The vulnerability that has become his hallmark is more potent than ever, stretched like skin across nine tracks-- or nine movements-- that trace love's arc of complex intimacy and ever-evolving emotional epiphany. Desire, neediness, vulnerability, fear, pleasure, and confusion are all laid bare. Held is a love album, a modern love album. Not love as aspirational fantasy but lived love, contradictory love-- the real love that stifles as much as it soothes. In that, it has a kinship with a generation of artists, including How to Dress Well, the xx, and Mount Kimbie, who reach to articulate love's many aspects in new ways.
The Burial-recalling distorted vocal elements Holy Other teased into being on With U are again deployed here, distilled to their base energy and impulse. Where garage, R&B, and pop all channel a predominantly feminine pressure, the power of Held balances on its call and response between both masculine and feminine elements, most notably on "Past Tension" where two voices venture "I was...I was..." back and forth to poignantly familiar effect, recalling a relationship's occasional veer into petty power struggle. How much Holy Other can say while saying very little is perhaps his greatest skill. The abstract lack of directness is somehow more direct: When all the words have been said, when the snap of their intention grows slack with overuse, only touch says what is truly meant.
The first three seconds of Held-- announcing question-and-answer track "(W)here"-- are a roar of submersion, a displacement to Holy Other's underwater world where meaning and emotion are fluid, never fixed. As if to illustrate, his slippery approach to language is extended to his titling. "Inpouring", the album's closest connection to With U, suggests a play on imploring and outpouring, and evokes that flood of emotion from one to another that can often feel like assault. Glowing with golden chimes and Janet Jackson finger clicks, "In Difference" is the flip to "Inpouring", an expression of fatigue from the latter's torrent of emotion with its delicate plea to "beat my heart," perhaps because the protagonist no longer has the energy.
"Love Some1" is the most dramatic moment on the album, wracked with loneliness and a dead-of-night intensity. While it has a thriller-movie tension-- its scissor synths recalling Psycho's shower scene-- the call and response of "Love someone/ Me, me, me" realizes a much more prosaic yet no less chilling fear.
Having played up duality throughout the record, Held's climax is its two-part finale of "Held" and "Nothing Here". The title track representing humanity's greatest desire fulfilled: to be held, to be comforted, to be loved. Halfway through its racing pulse-like beat and waves of warm low-end give way to piano chords that sound out like a sweet release from consciousness. On "Nothing Here", love's embrace is replaced with an image of what follows all of life's yearnings: the nothingness of death, itself the final embrace. Or perhaps that's getting too melodramatic, something that listening to Held at length will do to a psyche-- or maybe not; Holly Other paints life, entrails and all. His music is of the wholly sensual, painfully physical kind, and with Held he triumphantly translates his bruised intimacy to full-length format without losing any of its skin-prickling power.
