Album Review: Holy Fingers, III
Folk-informed heavy psychedelic blues rockers Holy Fingers are among the best kept secrets in the Baltimorean underground, and their third full-length, the self-released III, is a moment of realization that’s due more fanfare than it is likely to receive. They arrive its Jan. 1, 2024, release date at eight years’ remove from their 2016 self-titled debut, released as the instrumentalist trio of Dave Cannon, Theron Melchior and Josh Weiss prior to guitarist/vocalist Tracey Buchanan joining ahead of 2018’s follow-up, Holy Fingers II (discussed here), and continues a thread of collaboration with producer Kevin Bernsten at Baltimore’s Developing Nations Recording Studio that began on the last record and was most definitely not broken there and as such requires no fixing across the eight-song/circa-40-minute Holy Fingers III, which finds the band pushing further into progressive textures and expanding the reach of their songwriting.
A fuzzy roll arrives just a second after Buchanan starts the first line of opening track “Blood Run Sun,” beginning right after, “You are my…” and before the title itself is delivered. Later pieces like “Astral Anchor” and its complement “Estival” will dig into vibes born of ’60s Britfolk and given semi-retroist heavy life in such malleable fashion as to remind of Graveyard in “Bring Me the Beasts” before the more urgent rhythm of “Hunted” casts that in the Americana-infused neofolk of Wovenhand and leads through the album’s side flip and into the soft shuffle of “Majnac” ahead of “In Warrior’s Stead” and “Hunter’s Moon,” which turn toward heavy post-rock expanse, building on the hints toward Black Math Horseman-style ceremony in “Hunted” and, in the latter, tying that in part to the more folkish side, tying together elements that have been spread throughout but not feeling forced in the doing.
In fact, let’s take that ethic, start it at the start and pull it over the rest of the album like a well-flattened top-sheet (you bedmakers know what I’m talking about): It is unforced. I do not know the circumstances that might’ve led to six years between Holy Fingers‘ second and third full-lengths, but I don’t imagine the band is anyone’s full-time, live-on-this gig, and life happens. Sometimes it happens that a band will turn around after a while and crunch a record together and rush it out to get on tour, etc. That’s not this. The songs on Holy Fingers III feel lived with and lived in. They’re not overthought, but they’ve been smoothly balanced to become what they are, and that worked-on feel extends to the linear fluidity that runs from front to back. Holy Fingers are grooving here as a paramount, and coinciding with that is the focus on melody mostly but not entirely represented in Buchanan‘s vocals.
That is to say, while Buchanan is a strong presence throughout, her voice isn’t the only source of melody. The bouncing slink of “Majnac” is all the more memorable for the way its notes move up and down, a cool born of jazz and turned into classic-style prog, and the lead guitar in “Hunter’s Moon” adds no less drama to the closer’s outward procession than the cave-echo treatment on the vocals. As they draw from different influences throughout and bring ideas together across various songs, the presentation is never quite the same twice and never so outlandish as to be out of place. A shorter cut can be intense as “Hunted” gets or languid like “Blood Red Sun” at the outset, its later jangle like proto-grunge noise played at half-speed with about a quarter of the directionless, would-be-silly-in-context aggression. Longer songs like “Astral Anchor” unfurl a complete build, and “In Warrior’s Stead” — the longest inclusion at 7:28 — accomplishes this while in conversation with the broader sphere of American heavy psychedelia, seeming specifically to work off of some of King Buffalo‘s make-a-world-and-put-a-riff-in-it ideology.
And in all of this, in the places it goes and the stylistic shifts and slight turns it makes along the way, Holy Fingers III is unflinchingly organic. Its pacing isn’t staid or too slow, but it works into a kind of steady nod and even when this is purposefully interrupted, as in the churning push at the end of “Bring Me the Beasts” or in “Majnac” — dig that line of fuzz running through the song; reminds a bit of something Lammping might try, as if my heart were not yet won here, and is indicative of both an intricacy of mix and the attention to detail that makes this all sound so easy in the first place — the momentum built isn’t wasted. If the side split is between “Astral Anchor” and “Estival” — and I think it is but I’m not 100 percent certain — then the first half of Holy Fingers III presses forward through its three shorter tracks into that pond of psychedelic lushness, while “Estival” starts side B with a folkish bent that lends the movement of “Majnac” a complementary Britness ahead of “In Warrior’s Stead” turning back to the far out and “Hunter’s Moon” ending big and expansive like some vision of the American West, complete with Morricone-via-Earth in the resonant and meditative guitars.
There is, just apparently to belabor the point, a lot going on in the material that comprises Holy Fingers III, but the band do not lose sight of their structured intent when faced with the task of moodmaking in their songs, and those songs are that much stronger for it. One could easily argue that it’s the underlying structures that allow Holy Fingers to harness such breadth of sound, but it’s academic as compares to the experience of putting the album on and having Buchanan commandingly lead the way into “Blood Red Sun” as the full band lines up around a classic-but-obscure-enough-to-be-individual groove warm in tone and melody but wanting nothing for heft either and able to pivot in delivery so as to be that much more flexible when it comes to atmosphere overall. There is, of course, also plenty of atmosphere, but like the rest of Holy Fingers III, it is accomplished with rare poise and distinct identity, adding to and taking nothing away from the collection of songs that feels nothing so much as loved in their making.
