The Holy Sea

In this environment, it’s courageous for songwriter Henry F. Skerritt to make Australian history the primary focus of The Holy Sea’s third album Ghosts Of The Horizon. This is a collection of songs that are both dark and expansive. The Holy Sea might share The Triffids’ birthplace of Perth and a predilection for epic structures, and they augment their guitar-based songs with keyboards, strings and multiple vocalists, but they are distinguished by the complex and affecting lyrics of Skerritt.

If the point of art is to hold up a mirror to society, the reflection we see in the music of The Holy Sea is one of violence and ugliness, tempered by a mournful resignation at the fact that Australia never experienced an age of innocence. This darkness is reflected in the music, with its haunting echoes of folk songs and sea shanties, and the broad cinematic sweep which has become synonymous with representations of the desolate Australian landscape.

Skerritt considers the present as part of a larger continuum of Australia’s colonial history, in which savagery has not yet been vanquished and is the ubiquitous background to contemporary experience. In the end, Skerritt makes the point that we are not yet a free and modern people, but remain divorced from our history, conflicted and uncertain, precariously clinging to a continent that remains as alien to us as it was when Europeans first landed on these shores.
RENÉ SCHAEFER