NYLON - January 2009 - (Page 134) sacred songs It’s impossible to describe Holy Hail in the usual “music writer” way. You know, with some trite comparison like, “So-and-so is a cross between Bauhaus and the theme music from Judge Judy.” When you first hear the Brooklyn-based group, you’re not really sure where the influences are coming from, but you don’t care because you’re too busy dancing your ass off. The group is the brainchild of Cat Hartwell, formerly of Fannypack, and Kevin Cooke. The two met at a summer barbeque four years ago and had that classic “let’s start a band” conversation that happens at so many boozy parties. Only they actually did it. “Kevin was using a broken old Casio keyboard, but he didn’t really know how to play,” Hartwell remembers. “We wanted to be really hiphop, with lots of samples. But his keyboard just had a drum beat programmed into it that we would speed up as fast as it would go, and we’d be like, ‘OK, we can sort of rap over this.’” “We had a lot of criteria for what we wanted to be, but none of it had anything to do with ability,” Cooke deadpans. Hartwell and Cooke messed around for about a year before deciding that they needed a bassist to really get going. Hartwell was casual friends with a woman who played bass named Michally Kaye, but she had just left New York City to return home to the Midwest. “But as soon as HOLY HAIL IS ON A QUEST TO MAKE YOU SHAKE IT LIKE YOU SUFFER FROM RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME. BY JOSHUA LYON. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ALEXANDER SINGH AND VIOLET PARR Cat called me and said she needed a bass player, I just said yes,” Kaye recalls. Their first rehearsal together was awkward. “We were all so nervous,” Kaye says. “Kevin was playing the keyboard sitting down. But I just started goofing around on the bass and then suddenly Cat and Kevin started singing over that. We had such big ideas but not much prowess, which ended up being a good thing because it made us all free enough to do whatever came to us naturally. It really defined us early on.” Their success came quickly, too. Just two months after that first rehearsal they were opening for the Gossip at an NYC show. “We were lucky in that there were people who liked [Fannypack],” Hartwell says. “So they were willing to give us a chance.” They got even luckier when, after only a handful of live shows, a wealthy benefactor with a passion for new music offered to sponsor a European tour. “We got a lot of breaks when we first started,” Cooke admits. Cutting your teeth with a European tour is a pretty effective way to get tighter as a band, and by the time they toured Mexico a few years later, they were drawing massive crowds. It’s hard to believe, then, that Holy Hail is just now debuting their first album, Independent Pleasure Club. Some of the dance-inflected songs are political, tackling subjects like Hurricane Katrina, but Holy Hail doesn’t have any kind of mission statement. “It’s just easier for us to write lyrics with a story in mind,” Hartwell says. “It could be anything from a movie we saw or something that’s bothering us about the world.” Which brings us back to what they actually sound like. When asked the question that every band dreads —“How do you define your sound?”—they don’t answer, but rather cast tentative glances at one another. Kaye finally answers, “We’re too close to our music to describe it. I think people try to put us in a category, but it never works because we’ll come out with a new song that doesn’t sound anything like what was just described.” “We know what we’re thinking,” Cooke says, confidently. 134
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