Holley, Lonnie
Oh Me Oh My (black)
'Oh Me Oh My' is both elegant and ferocious. Lonnie Holley's harrowing youth and young manhood in the Jim Crow South are well-told at this point. But Holley's music is less a performance of pain endured and more a display of perseverance, of relentless hope. Intricately produced by Los Angeles' Jacknife Lee (The Cure, REM, Modest Mouse), there is both kinetic, shortwave funk that call to mind Brian Eno's 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts' and the deep space satellite sounds of Eno's ambient works. Illustrious collaborators like Michael Stipe, Sharon Van Etten, Moor Mother and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver serve as not only as choirs of angels and co-pilots to give Lonnie's message flight but as proof of Lonnie Holley as a galvanizing, iconoclastic force across the music community.