Holy Fawn - The Black Moon EP



Holy Fawn is a shoegaze/doomgaze band from Phoenix, Arizona and after their awesome debut album 'Death Spells' in 2018, they released a surprise EP 'The Black Moon' in January of this year. Can they create that same feeling I got when I heard 'Loveless' for the first time? 




Tracklist:
1. Candy
2. Tethered
3. Blood Pact

The short answer, they do. The long answer is this entire review haha.

For me, the idea of shoegaze is first trying to feel some superficial emotion, which opens up much deeper lying ones. Call it euphoric sadness, or cathartic, in the end, you’re addicted to that feeling and you dive into the genre and never come out. That’s what happened to me when I saw a fragment of a noisy, distorted clip on MTV back in the ’90s. I really liked the ocean of guitar noise sound and the angelic vocals. Years later I found out that I saw the 'Only Shallow' clip from My Bloody Valentine. Because of that, I started a journey into that genre and it has fascinated me since. Especially now when there are many combinations of the gaze genre.

Holy Fawn falls in the shoegaze genre. On 'Death Spells', they logically flirt with metal and postrock, it’s got giant waves of sound and gently flowing streams just like a genuine shoegaze record should have. On a full-length album, you think the chance of getting submerged in the music is much larger than on a three-song EP. Yet they manage to do that on 'The Black Moon'. Holy Fawn are capable of tightening the knot that ties metal, postrock and shoegaze together. Opener 'Candy' already fascinates me during the intro when you hear two doors close. It is that sort of thing that keeps me interested. 'Tethered' brings me back to Brian Eno. Just an overwhelmingly calm piece of art which reminds me of an endless calm light-blue sea. When the beat in 'Blood Pact' begins it starts off as a dark Earl Sweatshirt-esque beat. When the dreamy guitars come in you’re immersed in a hot spring, and just before you go under someone’s shouting ‘hey’ but it’s too late. You sink deeper, the water gets colder, then you look up and see scattered rays of sunshine. You remember. And you swim up. A hand pulls you to the surface.

Holy Fawn are a perfect example of what experimental music should sound like. They have no boundaries, which helps in making the music so much more deeply emotive. Everything is in the right place, even the mysterious artwork by Reilyn Anderson.

So far this EP has only been digitally released, but I hope, that there’s someone out there who can put 'The Black Moon' on wax (when this epidemic is over of course). There are a few records that connect with me so deeply and this is one of them. 



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