Staff Reviews

David Holmes - Late Night Tales

Review by Mike McGrath-Bryan

A dense but gripping mix that spans periods of Holmes' career and a great breadth of his frame of reference»

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DJ and producer David Holmes is welcomed to the Late Night Tales fraternity with an evocative collection of personal songs and music, peppered with exclusive new material and rare gems.

By now, I think we all know David Holmes, right? There's acid house Holmes, with bone-rattling Chicago jams and Detroit destroyers; break-digger Holmes responsible for the grittily shaking 'Let's Get Killed' and seminal Essential Mix compilation (which brought Sixto Rodriguez to people's attention, and then there's soundtrack Holmes. His most enduring and vital source of musical inspiration - cinema - plugged into David's first solo record 'This Film's Crap, Let's Slash the Seats' and inspired 2000's 'Bow Down to the Exit Sign'; created as the soundtrack to a not-yet-made movie. Official soundtracks have been bountiful, including scores for Soderbergh's Out Of Sight and Ocean's trilogy, '71, Hunger and Good Vibrations. In a series of personal songs sung by himself, David's last solo album 'The Holy Pictures' explored influences of La Düsseldorf, The Jesus and Mary Chain and early Brian Eno. His Unloved collaboration with Keefus Ciancia and Jade Vincent then took us on a musical journey full of raw 60s pop-noir, psychedelia and French Ye Ye with a contemporary twist. Somehow he's also found time to produce records by Primal Scream and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Unsurprisingly, for someone au fait with matters cinematic, this Late Night Tales conjures up its own mindmovies. It's not only packed with the judiciously selected nuggets for which his mixes are noted but also stuffed with original material, including collaborations with BP Fallon and Jon Hopkins and an amazing new reading of 10cc's 'I'm Not In Love' by Holmes-produced Song Sung. In fact, there's a Celtic thread running through the whole journey with Stephen Rea's reading of an extract from Seamus Heaney's Aeneid Book VI - Elsewhere Anchises'. Among the other gems included here are David Crosby's lush 'Orleans', Buddy Holly's celestial 'Love Is Strange' and the Children Of Sunshine's 'It's A Long Way To Heaven'. David Holmes loves music. It's a way of expressing the sometimes inexpressible or the inconsolable; a questing desire to find out just what is over the next hill. It's no surprise to learn he's a keen walker. Always on the move, headphones on, lost in some reverie or piece of music; the soundtrack to his life, the stuff that feeds his imagination.
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