Holy Motors - Slow Sundown

I got taken to see Cigarettes After Sex recently. Whilst the sound captured memories of the junkie trash indie I so loved with Mazzy Star, there was something disappointingly anodyne about listening to narcotic haze served up by such nice looking, well dressed fellas. There lies the problem. Removed of context and devoid of originality, Cigarettes After Sex made Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ seem impossibly dangerous. A cigarette after sex it might have been, but it was more self-satisfied than unifying. No mystery, just hubris.

Estonians, Holy Motors operate within the same spectrum of somnolent needle-stick rock, and they also manage to be leaden, prosaic and humdrum. For the most part they don’t have Mazzy Star’s ability to transcend the indomitably saturated sounds of the 'bummer trip', and nor do they have David Lynch’s cinematography to compliment the sound, so the whole enterprise felt like meaninglessness aesthetic to me.

At least until ‘Sleepydr’, a lovely piece where dream-pop and shoe-gaze magnificently coalesce. A swirling and free-spirited guitar solo which to some extent broke the shackles.  

Too late though to save the patient.