Holy Mountain tells an ambiguous and yet morbidly captivating story with his recent song “Skin/Something Different.” The track might be more than 4 minutes long but the artist does a brilliant job of mesmerizing the listener as you slowly sink into the song’s enchanting melody and very personal lyrics.
Produced by Blue Moon Ring, the instrumental opens up with a rather peaceful mellow setting as the sudden sample “I don’t have anything to say” sets the dark mood for the rest of the track. The artist portrays the ambivalence and confusion of a deteriorating relationship while he displays his and the other person’s mistakes. Holy Mountain’s calm, almost celestial voice, paints this dichotomy very clearly with the following lines:
You wanna know what makes me tick so you can get underneath my skin
I wanna know what makes you tick so I can get underneath your skin
Quickly afterwards, the beat breaks down and progresses into the moodier, more heavily guitar-based part of the song. Holy Mountain takes advantage of the emotional shift and gives the listener a more specific, although still unclear, account of what is happening in the protagonist’s mind. He asks the rhetorical question “Is there something wrong with this picture?” emphasizing that there are so many things going on that the line between bad and good has been blurred. Hence, this unbearable conundrum eventually leads to the helplessness of the character as they simply wait for their partner to come back.
The song calms down again for a brief moment only to reach its full emotional potency at the end where the beat reveals its final form and Holy Mountain goes back to the reciprocal lines mentioned above. “Skin/Something Different” is indeed a blissful journey from start to finish. Listen to the song here: