Now then, this is quite something! First released a few years back by obscure tape label Ruego, Italian avant garde specialists Holidays stretch out into what feels like some previously unexplored terrain for them with this remastered vinyl edition of La Festa delle Rane's debut collection of gleeful avant folk-pop wonder. La Festa delle Rane is in fact the work of one principal songwriter, Lucia Sole, though feels shaped by a wide perspective, perhaps in part because the album was recorded over three years and five different cities, and made use of a range of instruments such as glockenspiel, flute, organ, clarinet, musical saw and melodica. This is certainly a rich palette. If there's an exploratory impulse at work, there's also a strange melodic instinct at play, derived in part from the kind of church song and folk intimacy that is very European in tone. Sole's voice is pitched high, and lands with an alluring intimacy, more in the spirit of lo-fi than, say, the learned halls of modern composition, and finds shared ground between Blod, Maxine Funke, early Joanna Newsom or Devendra Banhart, and Annelies Monsere. These are exclusively pretty songs, and they're also ambitious too, but crucially, they're uniquely playful in a way that makes sense of the project's name (trans: 'The Frog's Party') - you might call it child-like if it weren't so brilliantly executed It's the kind of music-making that feels very personality driven, a window into a private universe of untethered imagination and unfenced expression. In short, it's the sound of an artist doing as they please and coming up roses every time. Bravura performance from Holidays for bringing this one into the light.
FFO: Blod, Annelies Monsere, Roxane Metayer, Maxine Funke
