James Holden & The Animal Spirits

The Animal Spirits

The Animal Spirits is an impermeable fog that tells music’s derivative predilections to fuck the fuck off. The record is a lot of things and also unquestionably not, for the most part embodying an impregnable and extraordinary soundscape that fortifies itself against deconstruction, but its one truly distinctive quality is that it’s the precise opposite of boring.

Aesthetically the trappings may have changed, but The Animal Spirits is James Holden in head-turningly impressive form, applying his mind to a new modality and conjuring up beautiful, baroque and beguiling results.

Simultaneously more overtly experimental yet more easily accessible - even the most cacophonous warble here is rooted in strong melodies - than Holden's past output, The Animal Spirits is a triumph that makes rigidly electronic textures seem so last year.

On his third LP, James Holden establishes a sound wholly his own, allowing The Animal Spirits' gorgeous, absorbing and wonderfully unkempt mix of psych, jazz, folk and electronic to infiltrate the listener's psyche.

As with The Inheritors, the tracks were all recorded in one take, and move from euphoric melodies to intense improvisations. But this album is a fuller realisation of Holden's vision, as kaleidoscopic as the prog rock LPs to which he's clearly indebted.

The leap Holden has made from The Inheritors is colossal—now a bandleader of a live ensemble rather than a solitary synth programmer, he has opened the door to an entirely different sort of career for himself, one where concerns for the dancefloor shrink away to nothing, and the possibilities of repetition are infinite.