REVIEW
Holloway Road is the centre of a non-recent gentrification, a multicultural nest, and home to Arsenal Football Club (reminiscent of Orlando’s Backstreet Market of some other popular Florida lads?). This is the street that gives its name to this duo from Southend-on-Sea, who after a prestigious EP, are releasing a couple of singles that go straight to the heart.
The soft-rock, adult contemporary and country sound with streaks of pop prevails in the landscape, this last one perhaps connected with what was the traditional rural aspect of a Holloway Road from past days: a subsidence created by the passage of the cattle directed to an adjacent market, a reality that is so distant and difficult to imagine when looking through the windows of the cafes along the roads of this bustling neighbourhood.
The atmospheres created transport us across the ocean, into a road movie across the United States; “in the dark” spotlights their most gentle and charming looks, their catchy vocal harmonies and even the impromptu guitar solo that makes us to lower the car window while driving along sunlight road, the guitars slides melt us in a thrill which is the buzz of sugar and the bliss of beatitude (there even seems to be a banjo popping up over-there among the cacti).
“No place” is not just a track, it is a short film (we can’t wait to watch the next video). It is like passing through a vertical water mirror from the world of dreams, and when, finally, the first step is placed on the soil of that world, the mind has to deal with the sharpness of high definition horizons, where hope take the place of the bitterness of faraway miles.
And indeed, the road is both the symbol recalled in the name of this duo, and as a cinematographic frame. The sight of an American car’s rear window in a film set above which hang disarmingly blue skies drives us away from the reassuring neighbourhoods where we grew up, towards new times … Or vice versa.
Nando Dorelassi
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