Holy Sons Survivalist Tales

Despite the beastly image on the cover of Holy Sons' Survivalist Tales there is nothing at all on this record that is nearly as aggressive. While you might expect some wild ride of heavy music judging by the cover, what you get instead is some tripped out fractured folk music that verges on just being psychedelic enough to actually be good. Listening to Survivalist Tales is a tale in and of itself because the band seems to wallow in enough quiet acoustic moments as it strays into psychedelic drones. While the Holy Sons don't necessarily play folk exclusively, they let it sneak in under the radar and if they’re not careful, let it take over.

Survivalist Tales is a lethargic trip into the stars and its stylistically rhythmic textures attempt to keep it interesting. Quite honestly, the record struggles to do just that. So much of this record hovers around a snail’s pace that it's almost possible to fall asleep to. This is a record with very little pick up or energy to it and I felt myself drifting off throughout. Survivalist Tales is really like listening to a series of old sad-core records back to back to back and then listening to Magnolia Electric Company and wondering if you can stay awake. Survivalist Tales isn't bad per se, it's just that there's really no reason to listen to this record more than once...there's nothing to latch on to, nothing to remember, and no catchiness emanating from the tunes. In other words, it's as if Holy Sons have come up with the perfect quintessentially nice background music record.

While artists like Magnolia Electric Company play slow drawn out songs, they keep you gripped with a story telling like experience, unfortunately, Holy Sons don't seem to have that ability. As a result of this inexperience, the record seems to be nothing but a series of meandering pseudo-psychedelic passages that all seem to run into one another. I tried to dig this...but my ears need something...anything to latch on to and I couldn’t hear anything like that here. I mean, I guess, I should have known because it had the word FOLK involved in it and everyone pretty much knows my feelings about that stuff.