One day in early 2000 I was working the front desk at a homeless shelter in Portland, Oregon, listening to early mixes of the first ‘mid-fi’ HolySons record. As a rolling bass line kicked in on one of the tracks, a sweaty speed addict lying in withdrawal about seven feet from my desk sat straight up in a daze and yelled out, “David Gates, 1970, Make it With You!” to no one in particular and laid back down.

It was some sort of synchronicity that he’d heard that melody in the song as I’d been playing ‘Make it With You’ live most nights as a sort of defense mechanism in my early days on the West Coast. That era of Portland was being defined by Electroclash and bands like Glass Candy, so forcing Bread on people was the precise epitome of the very last thing anyone wanted to hear. This forced an unwanted confusion by lackadaisically asking “what form does punk music take now?” to an indifferent crowd that would’ve much rather preferred to achieve some form of escape or meat market ecstasy.

At this point in my life I hadn’t yet accepted that crate digging was very worthwhile, or that smoking too much pot and being miserable in general wasn’t really worth my time. So I proceeded through a morbid mid-twenties haze, sealing myself off inside a chamber of the past where only the classic songs preserved under the harsh lights of Burt Sugarman’s Midnight Special could comfort me. Turning back to a more familiar time when entertainers were still pock-marked and desperate underneath pancaked make-up, suffering from multiple kinds of withdrawal while trying to smile through a quick and insincere love song just to get to the next fix. Within this pantheon of broken-8-track-tape-on-the-side-of-highway-legends and stoned Sunday sonic therapists, lies the abandoned genius of David Gates.

Feeling the familiar burn of wasting my life and sitting on a healthy portion of general hate towards my fellow man, I slouched on a flowery bongwater-stained couch daily as the ultimate king of yellowed and burned out melodies sung to me about an innocent girl that seemed certain to have never existed. As my best friend had once said to me, “The world is harsh and these are the sounds that it needs, man.”

The beauty of Bread is encased in sour-ness and protected by a subtly profound repellant shell. The shittiness of a song like “Fancy Dancer” (which is also pretty fucking catchy) pushed up next to track like “Lost Without your Love” only builds a higher castle wall that listeners have to scale to get to the jewels inside.

unconscious

Look out for the new Holy Sons LP The Fact Facer, due via Thrill Jockey on September 23rd. Preorder yours.