Classic Pop Magazine
★★★★
"Have you ever doubted our super hipster being love-in?" asks Johny Brown on A Leap Into The Great Unknown. This intriguing approach to questioning the status quo is typical of BOHJ, who are an admittedly acquired taste but nonetheless neglected national treasures, yet the lack of a spotlight's done nothing to reduce their fecundity nor their grudging positivity. That Magic Thing brews up a storm, concluding hopefully "Love is a healing force", and chamber strings amid This Rhythm Of Life's desperate sadness will "restore your faith in humanity".
Prog Magazine
Band Of Holy Joy probably count as veterans now, but their 20-somethingth (counting cassette-only curveballs) album Dreams Take Flight (Tiny Global) sees their urban prog folk re-energised by pandemic paranoia. Heatedly political, intensely personal, it's an expansive set of epic songs, Johny Brown's voice cynical on This Is The Festival Scene but emotional on the Arcade Fire-like Rhythm Of Life.
Mojo Magazine
★★★★
Having perfected their existential beat-soul, BOHJ's third wave uses it heady textures to cast a caustic gaze at modern life. Optimism ultimately wins out, trumpet-flushed standout That Magic Thing forcefully concluding: "Love is a healing force."
Narc. Magazine
★★★★
When things take a turn for the dreadful, at least there's a whole new set of emotions for Johny Brown to articulate for us. Dreams Take Flight was recorded under lockdown and there's an extra level of anxiety to these songs, alongside Brown's eternal concerns - the wonder and furtility of love, the desperation and beauty in the prosaic, the power of art and music.
Musically, the album operates in familiar territory - a kind of lush, cinematic indie - but the arrangements seem a little more ambitious (Andy Diagram's trumpet and Sukie Smith's vocals stand out) and the band seem reinvigorated. Between the opening Ballardian horrors of This Is The Festival Scene and the reflective closer A New Clear Vision, there's a lot of magic here.
RnR Magazine
★★★★
It's been well over thirty-five years since Johny Brown started his distinctive chronicling of our times. The ever-changing line-up of The Band Of Holy Joy - shifting focus from the distinctive accordion of Alfie Thomas in the late 80s to the glistening guitar of James Stephen Finn today - has maintained a constant sonic evolution to underline Brown's keen eye.
And so it is in 2021. Dreams Take Flight is a beauty. The sound is punctuated by brass embellishing a richly inventive rhythm section and guitar switches from Smiths influence to orchestral. Towering above is Brown's tapestry of reflections on the search for something better ('always yearning for the starts' in That Magic Thing) and the struggle to know ourselves ('to live is to choose but to choose well you must know who you are, what you stand for and where you want to go' in Notes From A Gallery).
It's accessible but always challenging too. There are moments of drama, beauty and conflict - much like life really. 'Change is a ritual state in me', Brown says in Notes From A Gallery. Long may it continue.
Uncut Magazine
Sporadically active for almost four decades, the Band Of Holy Joy have survived glancing brushes with left-field pop fame, releasing more than 20 albums and amassing almost as many ex-members as The Fall. There remains something gloriously, stubbornly heroic about frontman Johny Brown's faith in old-school DIY indie values, literary and bohemian, whether spinning Ballardian visions of a Fyre Festival-style dystopia on the scouring jumble-sale jazz-punk ballad This Is The Festival Scene or belting out Shirley Bassey-sized brassy chansons like When Love Is Not Enough. Pitched somewhere between Marc Almond and Jarvis Cocker, Brown's tremulous voice is imperfect but impassioned, just like his enduring support cast of hard-bitton romantics.
Deviation Street
★★★★★
I need to admit to being a bit late to the party as far as it goes with The Band Of Holy Joy. Certainly I’ve been aware of them as a recurring name amongst the innumerable listings of previous decades, and it seems a fault on my own part that ‘Dreams Take Flight’ is the first of their twenty or so albums that I’ve actually got around to hearing. Formed in south London at the beginning of the 80s, band mainstay Johny Brown has pursued his own particular musical directions regardless of consequences, or so it would appear. There again, ‘Dreams Take Flight’ is hardly the sound of desperation, artistic or of any other sort. What it is, is a confidently performed and smartly produced work whose songs, while they’re reminiscent of numerous indie stalwarts of repute, retain at their core the occasionally mordant although always expressive words and voice of Johny Brown, while the measured, even meticulous music that provides a backdrop to the vocal matches the lyrical verbosity note for note.
On what is their twenty third album, The Band Of Holy Joy reveal themselves as an impressively tight group of musicians while Johny Browns highly literate – and importantly, accessible – songwriting carries a mixture of dark humours, ideas and statements and also an emotive power, aspects of his words that can appear within a single song. The eight tracks on ‘Dreams Take Flight’ are an impressive reminder of the existence of one of the most underrated 80s bands still making music today, should you require it.
Louder Than War
★★★★★
It’s 2021 and Johny Brown has never sounded more alive. The eternally youthful leader of Band of Holy Joy has somehow managed to reverse the traditional artistic arc of most songwriters and performers by producing his most vital work almost four decades after the formation of the group in South London.
Dreams Take Flight finds Brown exploring the strange, dream-like mind-state of the pandemic lockdown of the last year, perfectly articulating the existential dilemmas and frustrations that united us all during the strangest year many of us have experienced in our lifetimes. Arguably the most lushly melodic Band of Holy Joy album to date, Dreams Take Flight consists of eight perfect and purposeful songs that stretch out as long as required as Brown explores his themes like a post-punk Issac Hayes or Van Morrison. Co-writer James Stephen Finn excels as Brown’s main songwriting foil, but there are no passengers in this musically adept group.
Indeed, Dreams Take Flight invites comparisons with both Hot Buttered Soul and Astral Weeks, in terms of its heady, melodic intensity. Lyrically, it feels like Brown has reached the pinnacle of the themes he has been exploring in an incredible run of recent albums, asking questions about the nature of existence itself and finding epiphanic wonder in the minutiae of everyday life.
Dreams Take Flight may have been forged in the disorienting strangeness of pandemic lockdown, but Band of Holy Joy have created a strikingly beautiful and uplifting album, timeless in nature, and marbled with perceptive insights into the human condition.
The Quietus
Surveying their path it can seem as though they have existed on some kind of ongoing artistic odyssey. Of course, there have been quiet periods but then they come barrelling back like an old friend turning up unannounced, demanding you drop what you’re doing and come carousing with them, and you know what? You never regret it. The wonderful fact is that for some time now they’ve been in ridiculously rude health, bestowing album after album of unique and vital beauty upon us almost to the point where their past, as rich as it is, seems like a prelude rather than the main act.
There is melody in plentiful supply here, even if in seconds it rubs up against searing intensity as in the yearning ‘Take a Leap into the Great Unknown’. Key themes and questions are held up to the light, examined and if not exactly explained then at least put in some form or order, with bruised but defiant hope at the end of the search. The message, if that’s the right word, is to feel, think, act. I think it’s fair to say Brown is not one for the passive response but he is all about showing compassion for the lost.
This is a band on a quest, facing the brutal reality of life while celebrating it’s blinding glory. In this lies their power, leaving you caught between tears and laughter. Dreams Take Flight is another step into their future. Time to follow if you’re in any doubt.
