{"id":6135,"date":"2016-02-19T14:38:52","date_gmt":"2016-02-19T13:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135"},"modified":"2016-11-11T13:15:53","modified_gmt":"2016-11-11T12:15:53","slug":"julia-holter-at-gorilla-reviewed-by-luke-healey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135","title":{"rendered":"Julia Holter, Gorilla, reviewed by Luke Healey"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019ve probably heard something about Julia Holter by now. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter\u2019s most recent album Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> (2015) landed top spot in end-of-year lists compiled by Mojo<\/em>, Uncut<\/em> and Piccadilly Records, and singles \u201cFeel You\u201d, \u201cSilhouette\u201d and \u201cEverytime Boots\u201d have been rotated on BBC radio. 2013\u2019s Loud City Song, Holter\u2019s first release for the major-player independent label Domino, had laid the groundwork for this exposure, and precipitated a large-scale re-pressing of two earlier albums, Tragedy<\/em> (2011) and Ekstasis<\/em> (2012). Holter\u2019s drift towards the mainstream end of the independent music spectrum, achieved just shy of a decade since her first release for the influential Californian underground label Human Ear Music, coincides with a definite shift in musical palette. Where Tragedy<\/em> and Ekstasis<\/em> felt very much like (and were in fact) lo-fi bedroom recordings, with meandering compositions based for the most part around warm synths and distorted multi-tracked vocals, Loud City Song<\/em> and Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> are full band productions, at once more lush and more lean, with more sharply delineated melodies and cleaner vocal lines that make greater use of Holter\u2019s expressive range. <\/p>\n

In an interview for The Wire<\/em> published in the immediate aftermath of Ekstasis<\/em>, Holter confessed that she \u201cwould love to be a hi-fi artist\u201d and opined that \u201cevery single person that has been called lo-fi would say that it was a means to an end\u201d, plainly prefiguring the direction her next release would take. This quote is picked up on in a second Wire<\/em> interview, published last September, which is required reading for anybody seeking to get to grips with the negotiations and motivations that underpin Holter\u2019s body of work. Frances Morgan, Holter\u2019s interpolator in this more recent piece, praises the artist for adopting a fuller sound on Have You In My Wilderness<\/em> without thereby making \u2018a fetish of hi-fi qualities\u2019: as with earlier recordings, Holter\u2019s production choices on her latest release are a means to an end, and the album in fact sees Holter re-working some material from her lo-fi days. Of one of these tracks, album highlight \u201cBetsy on the Roof\u201d, Holter notes that you \u201calways have to be so delicate with old songs because you don\u2019t want to ruin them. You always like the demo better.\u201d In turn, Morgan suggests that \u201cHolter\u2019s concern for her compositions\u2019 skeletal versions makes it unlikely that she will ever ruin one with over-egged production, and also indicates that she trusts her writing to guide the sonics where they need to go.\u201d Holter admits in this interview that, during her time spent as a music student, \u201cI would have been really surprised to find that I decided to become this singer\u2026person\u201d, but now evidently recognises that her work needs to follow the demands of her songcraft. <\/p>\n

Because this songcraft is, in my humble opinion, so routinely outstanding, there\u2019s a lot at stake in seeing how Holter translates her recordings to the live setting, and there were some intriguing wrinkles to her performance at sold-out Gorilla, her third appearance to date in Manchester (at one point in the night, Holter claims \u2013 apocryphally I\u2019m informed \u2013 that the first of these, at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in 2011, had had to be spatially reconfigured due to only five people turning up). For starters, Holter\u2019s touring band is relatively skeletal compared to the ensemble that came together for the album, and is one member smaller than the last band that toured here, dropping the saxophone that contributes significantly to the tracks \u201cHorns Surrounding Me\u201d and \u201cSea Calls Me Home\u201d, both performed tonight. In exchange, Holter has added a back-up vocalist, doubling up on viola, who is trusted to perform some of Holter\u2019s own vocal lines from the album. This is made manifest on \u201cLucette Stranded on the Island\u201d, where Holter relegates herself to wordless harmonies on the song\u2019s soaring chorus. Given this decision, it\u2019s strange that the two don\u2019t then go on to interweave lead and backing vocals in the closing sections of the track: on the album version, the layering of sung with semi-spoken vocals provides a properly heady crescendo. It also seems a waste that Holter doesn\u2019t take advantage of this new live set-up to perform \u201cMarienbad\u201d or \u201cIn the Same Room\u201d, two much-loved cuts from Ekstasis<\/em> that make extensive use of simultaneous vocals, which Holter has typically had to perform in reduced form.<\/p>\n

In fact, what is most striking about this particular performance is its overriding sense of sparseness and simplicity. Holter\u2019s compositions are far from conventional but there\u2019s a sense of immediacy to some of the tracks played tonight that is startling. The artist introduces \u201cFeel You\u201d as a song which began as a drum beat, and while the album recording is lush and orchestral the live version does indeed sound snappy and percussive. \u201cSea Calls Me Home\u201d, which closes the set, drives home how comfortable Holter has become with performing vocals \u201cdry\u201d (her term, from the Morgan interview): until sometime in the build-up to Loud City Song<\/em> Holter almost never sang without some sort of obscuring effects on her voice. Maybe it\u2019s the shared theme, but the opening lines of the song as performed this evening put me in mind of Maggie Gyllenhaal\u2019s performance of \u201cLighthouse Keeper\u201d at the end of Lenny Abrahamson\u2019s Frank<\/em> (2014): there\u2019s a pared-down quality to the track, and a sense of bare-your-soul vulnerability that you don\u2019t ordinarily expect to encounter in Holter\u2019s allusive, non-confessional music.<\/p>\n

Happily, Holter\u2019s on-stage persona between songs \u2013 a persona which carries over into her delightful Instagram feed \u2013 is as enjoyably un-earnest as ever. Holter\u2019s real aptitude as a songwriter has never been about centring herself as the lyrical subject of her pieces. Throughout the evening she flits between different voices: \u201cLucette Stranded on the Island\u201d is narrated from the point of view of a side character in Colette\u2019s story Chance Acquaintances<\/em>, while \u201cVasquez\u201d \u2013 the highlight of the evening \u2013 sees Holter identifying with Mexican outlaw Tiburcio V\u00e1squez, and the encore is divided between \u201cSea Calls Me Home\u201d and a cover of Burt Bacharach\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Make Me Over\u201d. It\u2019s this dialogic tendency to Holter\u2019s music that Morgan picks up on in comparing the artist to genre-bending non-fiction authors like Maggie Nelson: as Morgan puts it, whether Holter\u2019s words record real personal experience or not is \u2018irrelevant; it is the quicksilver movement between the personal and the archetypal\u2026that gives the writing its energy.\u2019 If there\u2019s a sense of bare-bones intimacy at points of this performance then, it\u2019s less to do with stripping back the obstacles that lie between the audience and Holter\u2019s subjectivity, and more with getting to know the raw data of her compositions, those demo versions that need to be handled with the utmost care.
\n 
\nLuke Healey <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019ve probably heard something about Julia Holter by now. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter\u2019s most recent album Have You In My Wilderness (2015) landed top spot in end-of-year lists compiled by Mojo, Uncut and Piccadilly Records, and singles \u201cFeel You\u201d, \u201cSilhouette\u201d and \u201cEverytime Boots\u201d have been rotated on BBC radio. 2013\u2019s Loud City Song, Holter\u2019s first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[15,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nJulia Holter, Gorilla, reviewed by Luke Healey - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Julia Holter, Gorilla, reviewed by Luke Healey - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"You\u2019ve probably heard something about Julia Holter by now. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter\u2019s most recent album Have You In My Wilderness (2015) landed top spot in end-of-year lists compiled by Mojo, Uncut and Piccadilly Records, and singles \u201cFeel You\u201d, \u201cSilhouette\u201d and \u201cEverytime Boots\u201d have been rotated on BBC radio. 2013\u2019s Loud City Song, Holter\u2019s first […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-02-19T13:38:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-11-11T12:15:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135\",\"name\":\"Julia Holter, Gorilla, reviewed by Luke Healey - The Manchester Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2016-02-19T13:38:52+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-11-11T12:15:53+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/e6deb0374609919f6e86f6ee1defe8cc\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6135#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Julia Holter, Gorilla, reviewed by Luke Healey\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"description\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/e6deb0374609919f6e86f6ee1defe8cc\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"caption\":\"The Manchester Review\"},\"description\":\"The Manchester Review was founded in 2008 and is published by the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester. 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