- Label: 'Tiny Global Productions'
- Genre: 'Indie'
- Release Date: '14th May 2021'
Our Rating:
For singer and wordsmith, Johny Brown, it is a badge of honour to be seen as someone who still cares deeply about the state of the planet and we humans who inhabit it. He is described on the The Band of Holy Joy (BOHJ) website as “almost perversely heart-on-sleeve and his heightened sensitivity is one reason why he and his band have never been part of, nor courted, any identifiable scene.
The nearest BOHJ have ever come to achieving mainstream success came with the release of the excellent ‘Manic, Magic, Majestic’ on Rough Trade in 1989. I was fortunate enough to see them live a couple of times at that time and can testify to the fact that their shows were inspiring occasions. There’s something reassuring in the realisation that, close to four decades on, the band seem to have not abandoned their core values or succumbed to bitterness.
Johny Brown remains defiantly idealistic after all these years despite the veracity of the street slogan glimpsed briefly in one video to the effect that ‘Capitalism causes spiritual damage’. ‘Dreams Take Flight is a political album only to the extent that it cocks a snook at the moral and ethical void overseen by the ruling classes.
The underlying philosophy is that hope of redefining the world rests in a belief in positive personal change and faith in loving awareness. A piece of wisdom in The Rhythm Of Life affirms that “If you always do what you've always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
Love is the healing force that leads to the bold claim in A Leap Into The Great Unknown that “eternity can be ours together.” The accuracy of this assertion is debatable but the refusal to give up on dreams is laudable.
The great unknown lies behind populist rhetoric and redefines communality as a force for good. Brown does not underestimate to the scale of the task; “we are born selfish and die stupid” he observes in the opening track, This Is The Festival Scene. Yet this does mean we must give up on the human race just yet.
Each of the eight songs on the album has been interpreted by a different video artist and these films formed part of an exhibition at London's Gallery 46 in Whitechapel, London. These can now be viewed from the comfort of your own home via You Tube.
“To live is to choose” might be taken as a guiding principle to the work. This is a line from Notes From A Gallery which was written about an art and performance installation at this same gallery space called ‘Liminality (Temporal Impressions)’
What Brown is singing about is not change for change’s sake but something that expresses one’s true self.
All the songs were written and composed by Brown and James Stephen and, in the words of the PR blurb, they cover ”transitions from political discourse into a post-virus rebirth of human relationship and the inevitable fumblings of the society's psychological reconstruction.”
To present such complexity within a four-minute pop song inevitably necessitates some compromises but as the final track A New Clear Vision asserts, the possibilities are endless.
