They’ve been described as Toronto’s “evil supergroup.” A foreign reviewer wrote of their, er, blasphemous band moniker, “the name is simple—this is like the best sex that you ever had, only better.” Lo-fi savants, keyboardists Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh produce clamorous, rhythm-heavy electronic rock without the use of laptops or programmed backing tracks—you won’t hear any looping or splicing, for example—preferring to use real drummers and bassists. They don’t practice. They’re more fun than a barrelful of gut-shot high-tech synthpop gadgetry.
Holy Fuck is a great rock ’n’ roll band.
And the proof lies in 2007’s LP, a non-stop thrill ride, or rather a series of thrill rides, which makes the album an amusement park. The price of admission is cheap. The rides are fast, melody plays second fiddle to punk rock propulsion, and Krautrock blitzkrieg “No sleep ‘til Warsaw” get-up and go, and the real drummers (Matt Schulz and Loel Campbell) and bass player (Michael Bigelow) keep things sounding organic. This band operates less on electricity than motor oil and elbow grease, although you never forget you’re listening to machines—it’s just that they’re all fuzz and sizzle, gadgets with dirty faces.
This is noise rock, cataclysm in chains, mayhem in harness, the frazzled dead end of unsanctified sound. You can practically smell the burning.
Holy Fuck have released four albums since LP, but I maintain that it’s the best of them—all raw power, with one plugged-in flamer setting fire to the next, social niceties and subtlety be damned, although it can’t be said that its nine songs are devoid of nuance—even the appropriately titled “The Pulse,” an almost six-minute gallop to the finish line that basically just pushes everything in front of it out of the way, has its little twists in turns, including a couple of brief slowdowns and what sound like some echoing vocals in the middle. And live opener “Super Inuit,” a straight-up Krautrock rave-up if ever I’ve heard one, stops for some breath and what sounds like vocals on its otherwise V2-fast flight towards the center of your mind.
Holy Fuck also brings the funk, particularly on the super-fuzzed-out “Milkshake,” which sounds like Herbie Hancock on speed. A huge bottom, indecipherable vocals, some recurrent chiming, all in service of a super-charged electro-funk dive into do-fries-come-with-that-shake robotic delirium. “Frenchy’s” is more inexorable, a fuzzed-out death trip down the Autobahn in a hard rain of blips, the machine ready to explode and shaking all over.
And then there’s album standout and stand-alone “Lovely Allen,” a lovely, sweeping, and altogether majestic song that picks you up and carries you along, all strings and a melody that you will carry with you forever. It comes from out of nowhere, obliterates you with beauty, and demonstrates that these guys have a whole other side to them that you want to hear more of.
“Royal Gregory” is step-to-it dance floor royalty; lots of knobs are twiddled, and the band pounds out a rhythm that is unimpeachable, accented by some indecipherable chanting. It has as strong a pulse as “The Pulse,” and the live drummer makes all the difference, that and the fuzzy space spazz and squiggle. “Echo Sam” is all percussion and menace, with the machines making a savage rumbling that is accentuated by the cries of the band’s members. This is punk rock sans guitars, a movable feast of fuzz, echo, and fear.
“Safari” opens on a playful note, devolves into mathematical machine rock, then takes off. It sounds like a calculator gone mad, one that has decided to get up and run around in circles. It’s all whizz-bang, crackle, and hum, and it keeps running into walls. The safari is in your ears, and the Range Rover is on its back and in flames. And it moves on to the equally playful “Choppers,” with its looping, loping bass line and space cadet keyboards generating random noises and fuzz. Echoes bounce off walls into other echoes. Run face-first into flaming walls of fuzz. This baby is as busy as a pair of those chattering teeth making their way across the floor towards you.
Holy Fuck delivers thrills galore on LP, more (or so I think) than they do on any of their increasingly mature but less hell-bent-for-pleather later albums. Which isn’t to say they’ve stopped serving up sonic pleasures. Their 2022 single “Ninety Five” is all fuzzed-out bottom, their slick 2021 single “Lost Cool” (with Lucia Tucchetti on vocals) is cool personified, and while songs like 2016’s “Tom Tom” may lack acceleration, they make up for it with inexorable grooves and lots of sonic detailing that makes every single song I’ve heard by them worth hearing again.
Still, I think I’ll stick to the punk rock. Sophistication may impress the ladies, but adrenaline is a man’s very best friend.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
