Radon Reviews: The Holiday Crowd “Over the Bluffs”
Put on your legwarmers and hi-tops, because The Holiday Crowd’s debut EP Over the Bluffs sounds like it was the very thing written for John Cusack to be awkwardly in love to while Molly Ringwald shows us all that there’s a lot of societal pressure to being a teenage girl. This is a band that is going to be plagued by comparisons for their entire career for the bands that obviously influence them, and it takes exactly 30 seconds of any song of theirs to convince and unconvince yourself a dozen times that it’s really, for example, The Smiths you’ve been listening to all along.
I always appreciate music like this, that feels so out of its time that what better time is there than now to listen to it? The combination Colin Bowers’ jangly, almost island-style guitar playing and singer Imran Haniff’s throaty wails call into mind all the great bands who were making a name for alternative music thirty years ago. This isn’t a matter of pretending and emulating something they’re not. The Holiday Crowd could have been an easy hit in John Peel’s book, landed in a spattering of John Waters film soundtracks, and lip-synched their songs on Top of the Pops, and nobody would bat an eye.
One of the really great things about this EP is that it knows its time is limited, and so it minces nothing. From the very beginning you get a clear picture of what you’re going to be listening to, and it stays true throughout. If you like the first minute, you’ll like the other twenty. Lead track “Never Speak of it Again” is an absolutely beautiful piece of songwriting that is as good for the isolationist, blustery days leading into spring as it is for your theme-costume throwback parties. “Pennies Found” is everything Morrissey would have ever asked for in a song and more.
