Borrowing the title of William Golding’s book for this album is no coincidence: its expansive themes of extinction and evolution are indistinctly mirrored in both its music and instrumentation.
James Holden has fashioned his own Heath Robinson-like digital/analogue hybrids with which to construct a mythological landscape.
‘The Inheritors’ conjures a shamanistic English dreamtime of pulsing polyrhythms and warped melodies. Composed entirely of first takes, its exotic woodwinds, céilidh reels and offbeat orchestration intensifies each track with a vitality and immediacy which thrillingly threatens to career into chaos.
This is the music of ritual, an electronic folk chimera of primordial pagan beats, ancient and timeless yet psychedelically futurist.
8/10
Words: Anna Wilson
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