Gospel Music

How To Get To Heaven From Jacksonville, FL

krs557 digital/LP

Press Contact

Shaker Maker PR
Tim Plumley
tim@shakermakerpr.com
323-515-2285

 

How do you get to Heaven from Jacksonville, Florida? Beats the hell out of us, but Owen Holmes, aka Gospel Music, has an idea. The indie-pop songwriter’s debut LP takes its title — and its cover art — from a turn-or-burn evangelical tract he used to hand out as a Southern Baptist teenager. While his fundamentalist worldview started showing cracks around the time he found out there are 400,000 species of beetles, his Bible Belt upbringing made an indelible impression, even if the gospel he’s now spreading is one of the dive bar, the faltering romance, the boiled peanut.

The last time we heard from Gospel Music — on 2010’s duettes EP — Holmes was collaborating with members of The Magnetic Fields, Camera Obscura and other like-minded artists, creating a sound critics compared to Jonathan Richman, Silver Jews and The Vaselines. On How To Get To Heaven From Jacksonville, FL, he further develops his homespun lo-fi, layering toy piano, organ and banjo over jangly guitars, bouncy basslines and minimalist drums. His playful, conversational baritone sits squarely between that of David Berman and Lou Reed, while lots of syrupy female vocals, this time from his Jacksonville friend Madeline Long, provide the perfect foil.

At the center of it all are Holmes’s pithy lyrics. Lead single “This Town Doesn’t Have Enough Bars For Both Of Us” finds him trying to avoid an obstreperous ex during a night out (“I’m not drinking anymore / but I’m not drinking any less”). In “Bedroom Farce,” he and Long play lovers smitten with, respectively, a special-education teacher and a Proust enthusiast who are themselves lovers — “guess we’re stuck with each other,” he and Long conclude. “Let’s Run” is a Velvet-Underground-informed ode to long-distance running, with a promise to his partner of “a beer for each mile when we’re done.” (Holmes is a Boston-Marathon-qualifying runner.) “Apartment” features Long in a twee-pop gem that would be at home on an old Sarah Records comp, while Holmes wears his Magnetic Fields influence on his sleeve in album closer “You Don’t Have To Be Alone (But You Can’t Be With Me).”

Holmes made the record at home in Jacksonville and recruited Charles Newman (Stephin Merritt’s engineer) for mixing. A copy of the original How To Get To Heaven From Jacksonville, FL pamphlet is included in the vinyl version of the album, set to be released on Oct. 25. That’s also when Holmes takes the Gospel on the road, with Long and a similarly good-looking backing band in tow. God bless Gospel Music.

 

Track listing:

01. Bird/Fish
02. This Town Doesn't Have Enough Bars For Both of Us
03. I Shared Too Much With Her
04. I Can't Be A Man If I Don't Have A Woman
05. Bedroom Farce
06. We Think The World Of You
07. Let's Run
08. Apartment
09. Death Of The Newspaper
10. No Sharks
11.You Don't Have To Be Alone (But You Can't Be With Me)

Praise for duettes:

“Holmes naturally has the low, gravelly voice and occasional monotone of Calvin Johnson or Adam Green, and he has smartly crafted raw, minimalist songs in the vein of Beat Happening or the Moldy Peaches to fit those vocals. … [T]he lyrics, which eschew complicated metaphors or grand ideas, are clever and conversational, like something a friend or the drunk on the next barstool has said to you before. … [F]ans of lo-fi pop would be hard-pressed not to be won over by his lyrical specificity, melodic infectiousness, and vocal collaborators.” — Pitchfork