If you missed your chance to see Julia Holter in the living-room-sized Rose Hill last December (and let’s face it, you probably did), tickets are still available to see her perform tracks from her most recent LP, ‘Aviary’, at Hove’s Old Market on 3rd June. It’s a venue that should suit her well.
While it’s an impressive piece of work, ‘Aviary’ must be a record shop employee’s nightmare. Because where the hell do you file it? Resident Records’ “Out there” section could be its best fit, but any genre is way too reductive to hold the thing.
No, Holter belongs to that elite group of artists who can legitimately be called “uncategorisable” (yeah, OK, “uncategorisable” is a category in itself, but let’s ignore that).
Sprawling, densely textured and uncompromising in its experimentation, Holter describes ‘Aviary’ as “an exploration of cathartic sounds”.
“I wanted to put sound before language,” she says. And although it is, at times, a challenging listen, her distinctive vocal style provides a reassuringly familiar ladder back to her more accessible work, such as 2015’s brilliant ‘Sea Calls Me Home’ — which we once heard playing in the Seven Dials Co-op. How’s that for crossover appeal?
The opening track ‘Turn The Light On’ threatens to be especially epic.
The Old Market, Monday 3rd June 2019. £18.50 plus booking fee.
