Scorched Jerusalem (Vinyl)

Band Of Holy Joy’s newest album is somewhat divorced from the general romanticism of their last four albums. Tiny Global Productions is ecstatic to release what’ll be considered one of the crucial, if not disturbingly caustic, albums of 2024. Scorched Jerusalem confronts the historic-political issues of the last several years head-on, and if you haven’t noticed we’re in a mess. The album’s first side is beyond grim, mixing an almost Adrian Sherwood / Mark Stewart-style production to some of singer Johny Brown’s starkest urgent lyrics in over forty years of recording.

Although it feels as if the band has picked startling moments from the last decade-and-a-half or so (one song references Anders Behring Breivik’s mass murder outside Oslo in 2011), there are moments – generally found on the second half – where the band’s instinctive grace & beauty power past the pain and brutality – French Riots sounds almost joyful, Palace Commune scales the top tier of BOHJ’s tower of majestic beauty, while When The Tulips Bloom The War Will End, with the sound of a Weimar-era waltz, as if to remind us of what lies behind us also lies ahead. We can’t overstate the importance and brilliance of this album, and especially its relevance to the utter crap the world’s going through at the moment. Johny and the band offer no solutions beyond “simple faith in people” (in the closing track), and only a liar would have you believe there’s much more to count on than that . . . if we’ve even got that.

We like to think we release a lot of great (if unheralded by the general public) records that mean something, at least to certain people. Scorched Jerusalem is a strange outlier in that it needs to be heard by more people than will likely hear it. It’s rather late in their career for Band Of Holy Joy to have come up with something so utterly transformative as this album . . . but here we are.