It’s also Jones’ personal way of drawing a line under an intense past relationship: “The album was about being so in love with somebody that they literally destroy you,” he explains. “I had to write the album as a way of exorcising this person from my mind and soul. I wanted a Bonnie and Clyde-type story, because I’ve always loved that. There’s something beautiful about the idea of rebelling together against something and losing yourself in the rebellion to the extent that it destroys your life. It’s the doomed romanticism thing.” Holy Vacants was intended the band’s final album , but instead constitutes a complete rebirth. “I thought we had one more record in us and we wanted to go out with a bang”,says Jones. Guitarist Ferrara, who Jones calls “an unbelievable composer”, sent the singer some bare-bones riffs and he found himself connecting with them immediately, hearing how they might work with strings here, a Moog and organ, maybe some brass and an all-girl choir there. And listening to the likes of opener “Archangel” and “Qeres”, with its free-wheeling but complex and cathartic, psychedelic blues, it’s obvious the band have moved light years away from their post-hardcore early years. They reveal their admiration for fellow New Jersey son Springsteen, circa Darkness on the Edge of Town with “Crystallophobia”, “Everything Disappearing” and “Extant”, and for Jimi Hendrix via “Hagiophobia”, while elsewhere there are echoes of Guns N’ Roses and The Mars Volta. But what might sound like an unworkable agglomeration of disparate parts is an intense and cohesive, hugely compelling whole, with powerful contrasts that make for a visceral immediacy.
TRACK LISTING
1. Extant
2. Qeres
3. Archangel
4. Crystallophobia
5. Burning Mirror
6. Hagiophobia
7. Chicago Typewriter
8. Vertigo
9. Gutted
10. Every City, Vacant
11. Everything Disappearing
12. Nyctophobia