Holy Ghost! - Dynamics

Never mind long distance runners. Forget all about tower crane drivers. Instead ponder the loneliness of the ageing clubber. The one hit with the creeping dreadful realisation that 2am isn’t “the start of a good night”. The one no longer sure where ‘it’ is at. The one thinking that maybe, just maybe that pounding, punishing beat is the source of that pounding, punishing headache.

Holy Ghost! are there. ‘Dynamics’ is an album which, on the surface, sounds like it’s having a fucking amazing time doing the running man to the Human League and New Order and Kraftwerk, but underneath is a swarming mass of insecurities. Of doubt and worry and ennui and sufficient existential burdens to make a French philosopher carefully place down their Gauloise, grasp them by the shoulders and demand they lighten up.

DFA have previous in the area, what with LCD Soundsystem having more or less invented this sort of thing. But here on ‘Dynamics’, Holy Ghost! seem to have a found a generation in between the kids throwing the house parties and the fat guys in t-shirts doing all the singing.

The mix of those contrasting emotion is strangely effective. Whether it’s the cowbell driven ‘Dance A Little Closer’, all smart lyrics (including what most be the first indie-dance deployment of the word “asinine”) or the bouncy ‘Changing Of The Guard’ being wo-oh-oh heavy with a distracted boredom, ‘Dynamics’ manages to have a pretty fair number of songs which are both inordinately catchy and strangely affecting. ‘It Must Be The Weather’ is reminiscent of !!!, if you’d stolen Nic Offer’s Cornetto on the hottest day of the year. ‘Don’t Look Down’ is reminiscent of the theme from Mannequin, had that film been about a guy who fell in love with a plastic dummy and took it down to a shiny 80s disco to throw shapes thus gaining her approval.

Nothing is gonna stop us now. For those who like their light-hearted empty-headed fun to contain a certain amount of concealed depth, ‘Dynamics’ certainly does the trick.