Progressive Rock
Self-released · 2 October 2026
“Mohawk River” runs 13:08 and splits into three parts. It tells the story of the men from the Haudenosaunee community who left their own land in the 1920s to go and raise the steel frames of the New York skyline. The first part is instrumental and has a harmonica in it; the second is sung by Joe Payne in lines that cover the whole register, and the third opens on a repeating percussion pattern and stabs of synthesised brass.
Seven tracks and 55:13, and the album’s first idea was the seven ages of man speech from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”, which Peter Jones recites at the end of “Seven Ages” (8:25). It is John Holden’s seventh studio album since “Capture Light” (2018) and the first whose credits list no guest instrumentalists at all: he plays keyboards, guitars and bass, and the rest is programmed.
There are four voices and they are handed out in blocks. Jones, of Tiger Moth Tales and Red Bazar, sings tracks 1, 5 and 7. Sertari, who is Karnataka’s new singer, takes 2, 4 and 6. Payne, out of The Enid, only 3. And Sally Minnear, of Iona and Dave Bainbridge’s Celestial Fire, shares “Surrender” (6:43) with Jones. “Shape Remains” (5:44) opens on layered wordless vocals that recall Gaelic mouth music and closes on a violin solo.
“Zero Minus” (5:22) is an exercise in spy-film scoring, complete with a nod to the four-chord James Bond sequence, and it is very well done. It is also the track that is hardest to square with an album about the thresholds a person crosses, and the problem spreads: with a different voice on nearly every piece and an orchestra that comes out of a keyboard, what goes missing is a centre. The most personal stretch arrives exactly where there is least going on, on “A Silent Spark” (5:08), which Holden wrote after visiting Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and which sits on an acoustic guitar, some keys in the background and Sertari’s voice.
The CD is sold only through johnholdenmusic.com and comes with a twenty-page booklet carrying artwork and notes for every track.
Rating: 7.9/10
Text by Guillem Cardós