I am flying blind here. I know next to nothing about Holiday Inn other than they were a '90s punk band from Rome, Italy, and have a reissue collection out on Maple Death this year. That collection is obviously 2013-2016. They have a legacy and a history, but the point of this review is not to unpack either. What I want you to do is just listen to Holiday Inn's record, and the reason for this is that it is nasty as hell. I spent long nights scouring Myspace for bands that sounded like this in college- some nights were more successful than others- but it was always worth the effort to find something incomparably weird and exciting. I'm still perpetually on the hunt for bands of this obtuse character and Holiday Inn fits the bill! There is a certain perverse and decisive quality to the band's overheated, underproduced, shouty and scruffy minimalist noise punk recordings that I find both comforting and validating in a way that I probably shouldn't be so ready to admit to... but I will anyway. There is something cathartic about how pathologically offputting Holiday Inn's music is and I find a strange kind of validation in its abrasive self-assertion. I have the same kind of self-identification with groups like Lumpy and the Dumpers for the same kind of reasons- although Holiday Inn is discernably more deranged and treacherous sounding. If a group like The Coneheads is a shot of discount liquor that sends a shiver down your spine, then Holiday Inn is the kind of drink that will lead you to leap from your barstool in search of the men's room. If Gee Tee were a cracked jar of pickled eggs sitting at the end of the bar that no one has opened in half a decade, then Holiday Inn is like an electric kettle filled with boiled piss and cigarette butts sitting next to the dumpster outback - you do not want to take a swig, but you also can't help but marvel at the depravity of its sheer existence. Existence through depravity, depravity as existence- this is the vibe I get from Holiday Inn and it's why I think they're freakin' great!
