Home Is Where started with a simple ambition: to make music for their friends. The result, I Became Birds, reached a far wider audience than anyone involved anticipated. Heralded as an important new voice in emo, cries of “Home Is Where forever” from both the band and their fans have bounced around Twitter in the two years since that album became a sleeper hit. The band’s followup, The Whaler, feels hellbent on living up to sky-high expectations. In short, it’s a concept album set in a time warp where 9/11 occurs over and over again. Their musical compositions are as influenced by Jeff Magnum as they are by Bob Dylan. Their songwriting is at turns beautifully poetic and gut wrenchingly visceral. It’s a wild swing that hits its mark, resulting in one of the best and most resonant albums of the year.
Listening to The Whaler, you may or may not pick up on everything I’ve just described. The narrative element in particular isn’t always readily apparent in the album’s sometimes cryptic lyrics, but “9/12” makes its message clear: “And on September 12th, 2001 / Everyone went back to work“. After one of the most traumatic days of our lifetimes, we returned to business as usual. In the two decades since, the horrors keep piling up: mass shootings, ecological disasters, assaults on women’s reproductive and trans rights, police brutality, and much more. Even when the accumulation of traumas makes every day feel like another tragedy, we all get up and go to work the next day. More than anything, this album is about that: trudging on in the face of unbearable tragedy.
The rest of the album is less direct about this theme than its central two songs, but they all deal with it in one way or another. Both frontwoman Brandon MacDonald and co-songwriter Tilley Komorny are trans women living in Florida, currently ground zero for the most draconian assaults on trans rights. While less overtly addressed than on previous releases, these facts linger over this album. There are references to “useless genitalia” and imagery that almost verges on body horror (intestines braided together, wedding dresses made from semen, teeth growing under teeth, weeds sprouting out of spines and gardens blooming over bones). Environmental decay piles up; swimming pools are filled with dead bucks and whales wash up on the shore. Though they’re often beautifully described, there’s no denying that there’s scenes of horror almost everywhere you look.
The album ends exactly as it starts, with a distorted tape loop. Playing the album on a loop results in an unbroken circle, one that won’t end until you decide to stop it. It’s not quite clear to me what to take away from this. Perhaps it’s a screed against complacency, cajoling the listener into action; on the other hand, it could just be a scream of rage into the void, all of us powerless to stop this vicious cycle. I lean a bit more towards the latter. There’s an element of hopelessness to these songs that suggests the band doesn’t believe anything can change (see the line “i’m spilling my guts to the gutless” from opener “Skin Meadows”), but it’s certainly open to interpretation. But whether you take a message of hope or hopelessness from it, there’s no denying the power of this music. Home Is Where forever, indeed.