The greatest form of protest is art, and David Holmes’s new album, Blind On A Galloping Horse, is the perfect protest art for these trying times. Holmes released his sixth studio album against a backdrop of Israel’s war on Palestine, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the UK’s war on refugees, all under the looming spectre of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite 15 years passing since his last organic solo album (2008’s The Holy Pictures), Holmes’s soundtrack output proves his finger is still firmly on the pulse of a turbulent society. Holmes has scored several critically important works in recent years, perhaps most notably This England, The Woman in the Wall, and Lyra, the documentary about murdered Irish journalist, Lyra McKee.
Two singles released over a year before the album embody Holmes’s ability to read the room. ‘It’s Over, If We Run Out Of Love’ borrows its verses from Noel Gallagher’s ‘This Is The Place’. Say what you will about Gallagher but defiant joy is the hallmark of much of his catalogue and this certainly comes across on Holmes’s track.
On ‘Hope Is The Last Thing To Die’, co-written with Unloved’s Keefus Ciancia, hope swells on propelling synths that give it a pulse, proving that it is alive and well and truly, as the song claims, the last thing to die.
‘Necessary Genius’, the album’s third single and sixth track, reads like an actually good version of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. While Billy Joel sang about momentous occasions in recent history, Holmes’s collaborator, Raven Violet, sings of its architects: the geniuses in question that Holmes reveres. It’s a who’s who of twentieth and twenty-first century counterculture, from Samuel Beckett and John Coltrane to Andrew Weatherall and Nina Simone.
The last verse rings particularly personal to Holmes, as he lists off his daughter, Nina, Lyra McKee, and Sinéad O’Connor, who sadly died in the midst of recording an album with the producer. The most poignant moment, however, comes in the last line, in a strong middle finger to the incumbent Tory government as the music comes to an end: “I believe in refugees”.
Much of the album tracks continue this defiance. On sprawling opener, ‘When People Are Occupied Resistance Is Justified’, Holmes makes perfectly clear his support for occupied peoples in Palestine and Ukraine, or even in his hometown in the not so distant past, as Violet repeatedly whispers “above all ignorance” after the titular refrain.
The whole album encompasses the message of ‘Necessary Genius’ – the necessity of free thinking minds in times of unprecedented disinformation. Holmes achieves just that, and does so not with a bleak portrait of a world in ruins, but with a message of hope and love that reminds us, when we needed it most, of the inherent good of the people.
