A quite extraordinary record. The kind you chance across flicking idly around YouTube and are staggered to discover and more surprised to realise that you were never aware of its existence before and that it's not hugely known and respected. A San Francisco singer-songwriter, best known as the writer of Dazed and Confused, this is an album from 1968, his second.
At once urgent and introspective, no song on it stands still for a moment or goes where you might expect it to go. Very much of its time, most obviously reminiscent of Tim Buckley records from the same period, Happy/Sad or Blue Afternoon, but it has a clear voice of its own and the songs are briefer and less expansive than Buckley's, rarely stretching beyond four minutes. Jazzy and thoughtful, its lyrics are snatched perceptions of momentary sensation .
There are no hit singles here, but Holmes isn't trying to write them. Although there's the songwriting skill to churn those out if he wants to you suspect (Holmes was also a jingle writer and you can pick up some of that gift for immediacy here), he's trying for something much more ambitious. It's full of that full on, acid-induced pretension, (not meant here as a criticism), that was such a feature of counterculture records of the late sixties.
It doesn't always quite work, occasionally forcing itself just too far but when it does, most obviously on Leaves Never Break, It's Always Somewhere Else and Houston Street, Holmes really comes across as a major player. The whole record lasts less than half an hour but there are no end of things happening in that short time frame. File next to Buckley, Van Morrison and Scott Walker, similarly gifted visionaries making some of their best records during the same period, pushing themselves as far as they could go. At its best it genuinely belongs in this company.
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