Survivalist Tales, out Tuesday from Partisan Records, is the ninth release from Holy Sons, a solo project by Emil Amos (who plays drums with experimental rock heavies Grails and Om).

“Holy Sons is a hermetic project based on the inner reality of one person, so it needs the traditional narrative ceiling to be removed in order to reflect the infinity that exists in a human being,” Amos told Wired.com in an e-mail interview.

“I think the most famous example of exploiting sci-fi’s flexible scenarios to suit an artist’s selfish narratives was the way Rod Serling created The Twilight Zone in order to talk about issues that his editors usually wouldn’t allow,” he said. “I also imagined Survivalist Tales being like the film Fantastic Voyage, but if it had been a journey into the human mind instead of the body. It was also built to be a blustery hi-fi record in the tradition of the sonic pretension of albums like The Wall.”

Holy Sons combines Jeremiah Johnson, Fantastic Voyage and Twilight Zone on Survivalist Tales.
Image courtesy Partisan Records

You can feel Pink Floyd’s concept-rock galvanizing Holy Sons’ new song “Slow Days,” above, and you can hear Amos’ dark sci-fi sarcasm permeating “Satanic Androids” at left. (The latter is one of many dystopian tracks from Amos’ excellent previous effort Decline of the West.)

Add those to Holy Sons’ near-decade of introspection and you have a postmodern philosopher looking to change his head and yours using science fiction as a scalpel.

“The palette of sci-fi seems fantastic at first, but it really just leads back to fundamental human issues that somebody like Socrates would’ve been concerned with,” Amos said. “The idea that we are experiencing a collective spiritual crisis is ancient and will always exist. Carl Sagan said that humans see life and the universe as an endless lazy Sunday, but he tried to explain that an immense violent explosion marked the beginning of the universe and may end it.”

That apocalyptic constant is the lifeblood of Survivalist Tales, which combines guitar, samples, Moogs and more into a series of spiraling, chilled anthems.

It’s avant-garde music for easy-listeners, whose pragmatic attitude toward user-friendly technology sometimes clashes with visions of machines gone wild.

Whatever works, said Amos.

“I’ll use any technology that helps me realize my imagination as fast as possible,” he said. “Any instrument or plug-in needs a balance between sounding beautiful but being fast, functional and efficient for me. I have no ethical reservations about abandoning any ‘traditional’-ism in music and if technology helps me escape clichés or conventional boundaries, then I’m often more excited about the freedoms gained staring at a computer than picking up the guitar.”

But just because Amos is deep and Holy Sons’ latest effort draws from Pink Floyd’s bombastic wellspring doesn’t mean Survivalist Tales is a concept album.

“Survivalist Tales began as a metaphor about the experiences of somebody like Jeremiah Johnson, in order to represent one person’s mortal struggles against the elements,” Amos said. “But no record is truly ever a concept record, and probably shouldn’t be. See Styx’s Kilroy Was Here for that brand of thematic failure.”

See Also:

• No Age’s Chaos Stomp Destroys Everything In Its Path
• Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest Conjures Idyllic Psych-Pop
• Brian Eno Streams Small Craft on a Milk Sea’s Hypno-Sonics

Authors: Scott Thill

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