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band of holy joy

Fated Beautiful Mistakes

cd - £11.99 | Buy
Over each of their last three albums - 'Funambulist We Love You', 'Neon Primitives' and 'Dreams Take Flight' - BOHJ has bettered itself,...
Scorched Jerusalem
  1. Born To Sin
  2. Stay Toxic
  3. Nihilistic Ends
  4. Existential Kills
  5. Scorched Jerusalem
  6. Dead Romantics
  7. Breivik Island
  8. French Riots
  9. Palace Commune
  10. When The Tulips Bloom The War Will End
  11. Playing At Being Sad

band of holy joy

Scorched Jerusalem

Tiny Global Productions
  • LP (pre-order)

    Expected Release: 17th Jan 2025

    £21.99
    Preorder
  • CD (pre-order)

    Expected Release: 17th Jan 2025

    £13.99
    Preorder

'Scorched Jerusalem' confronts the historic-political issues of the last several years head-on, and, if you haven’t noticed, we're in a mess.

The album’s first side is beyond grim, mixing an almost Adrian Sherwood / Mark Stewart-style production to some of singer Johny Brown's starkest urgent lyrics in over forty years of recording.

Although it feels as if the band has picked startling moments from the last decade-and-a-half or so (one song references Anders Behring Breivik's mass murder outside Oslo in 2011), there are moments - generally found on the second half - where the band's instinctive grace & beauty power past the pain and brutality - French Riots sounds almost joyful, Palace Commune scales the top tier of BOHJ's tower of majestic beauty, while When The Tulips Bloom The War Will End, with the sound of a Weimar-era waltz, as if to remind us of what lies behind us also lies ahead. We can't overstate the importance and brilliance of this album, and especially its relevance to the utter crap the world's going through at the moment. Johny and the band offer no solutions beyond "simple faith in people" (in the closing track), and only a liar would have you believe there's much more to count on than that . . . if we've even got that.

We like to think we release a lot of great (if unheralded by the general public) records that mean something, at least to certain people. 'Scorched Jerusalem' is a strange outlier in that it needs to be heard by more people than will likely hear it. It's rather late in their career for Band Of Holy Joy to have come up with something so utterly transformative as this album . . . but here we are