Gospel Music
Duettes
The Truth: this one is for the indie lovers - five tracks of homespun homegrown homemade shoe-scuffing heartbreakpop featuring a ruffled array of alternative special guest singers. GOSPEL MUSIC, aka Owen Holmes, is the man at the eye of this particular humble hurricane. When he isn't emailing CAMERA OBSCURA's Tracyanne Campbell or Darren 'HEFNER' Hayman he is playing bass with cheery Floridian indiepop critters BLACK KIDS. And when he isn't working on BLACK KIDS' somophore album he is laying down hobo-jumping leftfield nuggets which run the gamut from Johnny Cash to Jonathan Richman and beyond. But don't just take our word for it - this is what GOSPEL MUSIC / Owen Holmes has to say on "Duettes": "I had a couple of duets laying around, and one day I thought of the spelling "duettes" (to connote short, small-sounding, detail-oriented songs). I thought this was so brilliant that I purposefully wrote a few more duets, and that's the EP. Songs were then written in my apartment, in the kitchen, usually with a five-gallon batch of beer brewing on the stove, or while waiting for pasta water to boil (always put in a fistful of salt, and for God's sake, no oil). The only guest singer I'd met is Soko (while touring with Black Kids). As for the others, I employed the sleuthing skills honed during my days as a reporter to find their e-mail addresses. I sent each the song I had in mind for her or him. They agreed to sing them with me, and I'm still wondering whether the universe is playing a trick on me. I recorded the album myself, mostly in my apartment. When I say "recorded," I mean that I stuck a microphone in front of whatever I was playing. I played everything except for the drum set. "I Miss The Shit Out Of You" makes reference to the delicacy known as the boiled peanut, one of the few things that makes me proud to be from The South. "Gamophobia" includes what must be the first use of the term "in escrow" in recorded music. ("So long as you stay a gamophobe, these hips are in escrow," sings my lover, vowing to withhold her body until I marry her.). Regarding "Automobile," I really do have a little Honda, and it's paid for, and it has four doors. "Reinheitsgebot" is the name of a 500-year-old German law mandating that beer be made only from barley, hops, yeast and water. I chipped one of my front teeth recording the jaw harp on "Are Your Parents Still Together?" The tooth is still broken and will almost certainly remain so."