Many Americans leave the mundanity of life in the country’s smaller cities and towns for the supposed opportunity that lies within the sprawl of a megalopolis, but in the five years since the last Wild Nothing album Gemini, Jack Tatum has made the trip in reverse. Tatum has forsaken the music industry proximus Los Angeles for the comparatively sedate Richmond in Virginia, a location just a couple of hundred miles from his adolescent home of Blacksburg.
There were of course reasons, with the largely solo artist making some ironic justification in a newly confessed thing for ‘strip malls and big box stores’, but the main spur was the birth of his son, a life event worth delaying any record for and around which some of Hold‘s new world understandably revolves.
The script though for the most part is in the sort of dreamy synth pop in which true escapism lies. Opener Headlights On is a case in point and features Australian Hatchie, the first in a number of collaborators, but the only one that leaves any real impression. Fittingly for anyone now locked into a domestic cycle of sleep-do-repeat, Hold‘s urbania is most effective when it broods as on The Bodybuilder and Prima, whilst it’s left to Alex to provide some eventual, shoegaze-centric spark. Forgetting the smog might be good for the soul, but on this evidence, less so for your art.
You can read a full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 