Plumbiferous Media

Holopaw, a five-man indie band from Gainesville, was formed in 2001 as a duo between front­man John Orth and gui­tarist Jeff Hays. Fol­low­ing two albums on Sub­pop (a self­ti­tled debut in 2003 and Quit +/or Fight in 2005), the band waited four years to release their third and newest album, Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness. Unfor­tu­nately, though Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness has cer­tain com­mend­able sec­tions, namely lyrics and parts of the instru­men­tals, it has too many flaws to be an espe­cially good album.

The instru­men­tals of Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness can be split quite clearly into two groups: sec­tions and tran­si­tions. Dur­ing tran­si­tions, the instru­ments fol­low the melody pre­scribed by the voice quite closely, adding their own twists and inter­pre­ta­tions. The track shows clear direc­tion, every piece comes together quite nicely, and every­thing sim­ply works. How­ever, dur­ing the sec­tions, the pre­dom­i­nant meth­ods become unmov­ing rep­e­ti­tion and gen­eral inanity. There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­larly bad, except maybe the overly dis­torted plod­ding of “Boys on Motor­bikes,” but the over­all dulling effect ends up over­whelm­ing the tracks, and even the album as a whole. This, com­bined with a set of tracks that are often quite sim­i­lar to one another, does not exactly improve the qual­ity of the album.

John Orth’s vocals on Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness frankly don’t quite work. His ten­dency towards attempt­ing a vibrato at the end of each line quickly degrades into some­thing more like a well-practiced war­ble, which, over the course of the album, becomes quite annoy­ing. Addi­tion­ally, Orth’s ten­dency to stay within one closely defined vocal style at all times becomes oner­ous, espe­cially given the lack in vari­a­tion between the ten tracks of Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness. It can be said that the music is well-mixed, such that Orth’s vocals and the instru­men­tals sit on lev­els that would nor­mally be quite com­ple­men­tary to each other - but in this case, per­haps it would be bet­ter if the instru­men­tals were a bit more prominent.

Lyri­cally, Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness is inter­est­ing if often con­fus­ing - when the lines aren’t made incom­pre­hen­si­ble by Orth’s inces­sant whine. On “P-a-l-o-m-i-n-e,” Orth sings: “You see me stand­ing at the creek / Through the glass a heav­ing sil­hou­ette / Shoul­ders dropped, tips caught / But I was only bleed­ing / How could you know that I was only bleed­ing?,” an exam­ple of the well-drawn imagery through­out the album. Orth occa­sion­ally man­ages to pull off mean­ing­ful tellings of the sto­ries Holopaw is try­ing to tell (see “The Last Trans­mis­sion (Hon­ey­bee)”), but in many cases doesn’t do the lyrics jus­tice. In the end, though the lyrics are among the best parts of Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness, they’re han­dled in such a way as to make it almost cer­tain that they’ll be under appre­ci­ated - and it’s a pity.

Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness is a rather mediocre album. It has its highs, gen­eral lyri­cal qual­ity and cer­tain aspects of instru­men­tals, and its lows, most notably the vocals. Addi­tion­ally, the album is cer­tainly not ter­ri­bly dar­ing. There’s very lit­tle that could be con­sid­ered sig­nif­i­cantly unique, and Holopaw does not pro­vide much diver­sity through Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilder­ness. For a band that has had four years to work on this album, it’s a fairly dis­ap­point­ing final product.

This post is tagged 50-59, Holopaw