Words: Fil Pollara | Photo: Johnny Griffiths
Credit Note is the new EP by south-coasters Holiday Ghosts. It’s a rollocking garage rock record which compels you to hit the open road, even if the car air-con is bust and the pack of Marlboro lights you so desperately crave cost more than anything at Rough Trade East. It’s a touch more lo-fi than last year’s ‘Off Grid’ and a textbook advert for going into the studio recording live with an affinity for warm tones and single coil guitars.
Appetites were already whetted in spring when the title track dropped – sporting sounds akin to fellow FatCat alumni Milk Maid and emphasising the slight departure from perhaps the more acoustic, ‘Las’ type melodies which tracks like ‘Mr Herandi’ championed in the last record.
Punkish in track length, speed and gumption – the lyrics in ‘Credit Note’ are up-front, visceral but with a hint of 1970s malt shop and mystery machine America. None more so in the frenetic fuzzball contradictions of ‘Plain Dumb’.
Save for the twang-filled bulwark, ‘Bright Lights Big City’, Credit Note is a record of refreshingly low viscosity, whose effortless fizz and fusion of blues, rockabilly and indie rock rivals that of Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin’s cult collaboration on the Reverse Shark Attack EP from 2009. It leaves you wanting more – so I hope the bonus two tracks that are hidden from you mere mortals on the streamers surface some day!
Speaking of sharks, Holiday Ghosts are from Falmouth, Cornwall – the quartet’s nerve centre being the tight collaboration between partners Katja Rackin and Samuel Stacpoole, now joined by B. Spanks and Morgan Lloyd-Mathews. A big tour spanning dates in London (Shacklewell Arms), Cambridge (Portland Arms), Manchester (Gullivers) is on the horizon – culminating in an autumnal finish at the iconic Left of The Dial showcase festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Credit Note EP is out now on FatCat Records.
hardofhearingmagazine.com 