And he’ll show you how to make a miniature paintbrush too.
[Video][Website]
[6.00]
Frank Kogan: The voice is both burnished and bruised, meaning that life’s ongoing sandpaper has both polished it and rubbed it the wrong way. In support, meanwhile, the vibes have to choose between being soothingly genial snowflakes or weather-battered wind chimes.
[6]
Anthony Easton: This is genuinely beautiful, and the voice is efficient enough that it dismantles the racist discourses around African American music (esp. done by the elderly) and re-establishes them. Try to avoid the lyrics.
[6]
Brad Shoup: I think the technical term may be “tone poem.” Holley’s voice is a steady guide: no half-steps or uncertain phrasing, a clear baritone at a devotional volume. Again, destroy the industry; we will have music yet.
[8]
Ian Mathers: How on earth do you give a score to a song that seems like a deeply personal expression of heartfelt beliefs even when you can’t make out what they actually are, feel painfully voyeuristic throughout, and suspect that singing about them is doing him more good than it’s doing you?
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: Mystical free jazz as bluesy moan; or vice versa. Of course there are plenty of expectations freighted in the phrase “outsider artist,” although the ugliest of them also come standard with “jazz” and “blues” — the condescending understanding that because a work is not immediately intelligible as part of the august tradition of Western thought that no particular thought or skill went into it, just the raw emotional outpourings of something that we’re not fully prepared to consider a fellow human being. Blackness and mental illness are two of the barriers most commonly erected; others like age and class and language and socialization ring the inner defenses. Wait for a white guy to make it okay, preferably one with a camera ready to impose an august Western narrative.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: One man’s truth is another’s waffle, but Holley’s dedicated to his material, singing as if his soul’s crying to get out so it can show you something beautiful. Why it goes on top of a lullaby I don’t know.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Whether it’s yours or a friend’s, sincerity is often a bitch. Here this blight manifests itself in stresses that fall too conclusively on the last couple of syllables in a verse, the vibes, the elongated vowels. Not terrible but after a couple of plays I haven’t learned how to listen to it.
[4]