THE HOLIDAYS – POST PARADISE

Here come The Holidays, four intrepid boys exploring bright, reverberating, candy-coloured sound-worlds on their debut album, Post Paradise. They’re from Sydney, but could be from anywhere, really. The music (and lyrics) celebrate white-hot summer days and movement, and leave the listener stranded no place in particular. They deliver an utterly contemporary take on Afro-beat and post-punk, but with a cosmopolitan, hedonistic, restless edge. “I just want everything to be ok,” Simon Jones sighs on Heavy Feathers, over a syncopated bed of Jamaican steel drums and synths, his languid air suggestive of a man having an existential crisis in a banana chair. Moonlight Hours (the first single) is more of an energetic lope, and its mix of bouncy, piña colada percussion, stabbing rhythm guitar and razor-sharp lead lines serves as a template for much of the album. So far, so very Vampire Weekend, perhaps, but white boys have been indulging in this kind of musical tourism since the days of Talking Heads – and Martin Denny before them. The Holidays play 21^st century cocktail music: sweet, bubbly, with a melancholy sting.
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