Artist: A.J. Holmes
Title: A Better Standard of Ordinariness
Record Label: Onomatopoeia
Formate: Digital Album 
Release Date: 22nd April 2022

"What is needed is not more grand gestures but a better standard of ordinariness" - Peter Adlington architect

This is the first album that A.J. Holmes has recorded entirely alone, playing all instruments. It was recorded between January - May 2020, a large part of which was during the first Covid-19 national lockdown. However it also reflects view points from a world before the coronavirus pandemic, as the songs were written between mid 2017 and late 2019.


At the start of this album Holmes invites us into the unknown, into uncertainty with the almost epic greeting ‘Welcome to the Void’ 


Considers the rising of knife and gun crime in UK cities in the Doo-Wop influenced ‘Slow Riot’ 

Warns of something nebulous, contagious, potentially deadly that has already infected many aspects of our lives and is spreading, in the paranoid, claustrophobic feel of ‘Fear Gas’.

However ‘We’re all in this together’, or should I say ‘We’ve all lumped in this together’ A.J. reassures us in the soft rock ballad ‘Inequality for All’ 

‘You’ve Never Had it So Bad’ is Holmes’ inverted slogan in the deconstructed West African High-Life influenced tale of micro and macro ideas of contemporary community spirit.

No wonder Holmes lost some nights sleep during the making of this record as he recounts with his ode to insomnia ‘Help Me Lie Down’ musically inspired by mid-1980s indie music. 

The closing track is a pastoral psychedelic folk influenced canon. In which Holmes guides us on a hike over the East Sussex Downs and celebrates that despite the climate crisis, in the last year of the previous decade it was ‘A Good Year for the Mushrooms’ at least, as Holmes recites names of mushroom varieties…many of them fictional. 

Way back in the 2010s
 -
Although still relevant today, these songs reflect the latter years of the previous decade; the austerity decade. 
A decade of ‘slow riots’ that turned into full scale riots across the UK. Of the dreaded B word, which highlighted a national divide. Of the rise of polarised populist politics and in the midst of this the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn and his Socialist approach as leader of the Labour party. Of the Grenfell Tower disaster and campaigns to stop the demolishing of hundreds of council estates in London alone. Of rising concerns about global climate change… it was, all things considered, quite a tumultuous decade. However, not many saw what was to come in the first part of this decade - something that would make the previous decade, and all that came before it, feel very much like ‘the old world’. 

The title of the album is a quote from Museum Without Walls, a book by Jonathan Meades in which he wrote of architect Peter Adlington who suggested that what was needed was not more grand gestures but ‘a better standard of ordinariness’


Another claim to the quote is from English food historian Jane Grigson: “We have more than enough masterpieces; what we need is a better standard of ordinariness.”