The bristly, brazen anthems remain lead single “yes! yes! a thousand times yes!” is two in one, a catchy and crestfallen dance-punk groove interrupted by a glimpse of Home is Where as a soaring post-rock act. I do have a degree of hesitance describing The Whaler as Home Is Where’s Goodness, even though the latter is my favorite album of the past decade for all of its praise within more mainstream spheres, Goodness was met with a chillier reception by emo diehards who mostly seemed to want another “Your Deep Rest.” The Whaler is over twice as long as its predecessor, which packed so many hooks and energy into its 18 minutes that few could deny Home Is Where’s insistence that it was a six-song album. In the time since, nearly every worthwhile band in the genre has strayed far from the “straight guys with capos and Telecasters” template. Maybe lashing out against Modern Baseball and Title Fight was selective and reductive trolling of the preceding emo revival, but the central point held, a call to evolve or die. When MacDonald laid out the taxonomy of emo’s fifth wave in 2021, it wasn’t just an expression of love and respect for her peers and a means of organizing the various micro-scenes that had bubbled up during the pandemic. While there had been plenty of exciting emo albums released over the past several years, I Became Birds was the first since, say, the Hotelier’s Home, Like NoPlace Is There, to feel truly visionary – the arrival of a charismatic, confrontational voice who risked immediate backlash, challenging the genre to reconsider its default viewpoints. MacDonald and Komorny’s experience living as trans women remains foundational to Home Is Where’s viewpoint, though more as subtext here than it was on 2021’s I Became Birds, and especially dissection lesson, their momentous split with fellow trans firebrands Record Setter (see: the climactic “Names” lyric “I’m a woman, suck my dick”). Meanwhile, Home Is Where’s native state of Florida has become an experimental dungeon of preemptive, punitive measures based on no tangible wrongdoing – as trans women, MacDonald and co-songwriter Tilley Komorny might get arrested for using the bathroom when they come back home. Bush was seen as a paragon of compassionate conservatism for waiting 26 days to initiate military intervention in Afghanistan. The Whaler begins and ends with warped tape effects, signifying its message as much as any of MacDonald’s impressionistic wordplay – for the past 22 years, America has been stuck in a disintegration loop of atrocity, anger and absurdity that has become increasingly compressed and degraded, to the point where these things don’t even have to happen in order anymore. MacDonald doesn’t need to be a geopolitical expert to speak on the America shaped by the aftermath of 9/11 – it’s the only one she’s ever really known.
Now, it’s understood as the beginning of an ongoing era where our two political parties will find no common ground whatsoever, except when it comes to funding an endless War on increasingly vague Terror what once began as a dragnet for Al-Qaeda is now likely to ensnare protestors at Cop City. At first, the date was shorthand for an immediate future where any kind of introspection on American exceptionalism is annihilated by an animal hunger for immediate retaliation. When the devastating enormity of the situation finally dawned on my friends and I, we panicked, called our parents, prayed for the people who knew working in DC, and – because we started drinking almost immediately – felt an odd, wholly unprecedented rush of patriotic pride before we passed out we stirred back to life the next morning hoping classes got canceled.īut in the middle of Home Is Where’s sophomore album, the volcanic “Everyday Feels Like 9/11” is followed by a piano interlude where everyone goes back to work on September 12 and the previous day becomes 9/11.
On a blindingly bright Tuesday morning in Charlottesville, I had enough time to attend a 9AM lecture, buy The Blueprint and discuss the A+ review I planned to submit when I saw my newspaper editor at the gym. Home Is Where frontwoman Brandon MacDonald was in elementary school when the Twin Towers fell and thus is unlikely to have a solid grasp on a day that was actually just Septemfor most adults on the East Coast, at least for a few waking hours. I don’t think you need me to tell you that a song called “Everyday Feels Like 9/11” is not meant to be taken literally. Opus Echo of Starsong Review: One Of 2021'S Best Game Stories
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