Released: 31/03/23
The Northern Irish composer and musician David Holmes is already having a stonking 2023, and it’s only March. Following on the heels of this year’s excellent Polychrome from the LA-based band Unloved, of whom Holmes makes up one third, we now have the Belfast native’s awesome strings-and-electronics soundtrack to the Sky limited series This England, via Stranger Than Paradise Records. You may remember that the show, which focuses on Boris Johnson’s tumultuous first months as Prime Minister, and the impact on the country of the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, caused a lot of commotion when it aired at the end of last year – not least because it features Kenneth Branagh playing Boris in a really disturbing prosthetic mask (which actually made him look more like Gordon Ramsey than ‘Shagger’ Johnson).
Where the series was a valiant, but slightly uneven attempt at dramatising the egregious Tory lies and incompetence, the score – for which all the rhythms were created using heart beats, ventilators, defibrillators, ECG machines, and more – is at turns brilliantly propulsive, and spine-chillingly tortuous, capturing a sense of the virus creeping and crawling its way through UK cities. The equal of, but markedly different to, his celebrated scores for Out of Sight, the Oceans trilogy, and Hunger, This England is yet more evidence that Holmes is one of the most gifted, imaginative composers that we have.