Home Is Where – Hunting Season | Album Review
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Wax Bodega
Until recently, Home Is Where’s bio across streaming services read simply, “our band could be yr neighborhood.” It was a fun play on a classic Minutemen line that gave an entire book on indie rock its title, but together with the band’s name, it always resonated more as a mission statement. This is hardly a surprise: both myself and all four members of the group are from Florida, and I cannot think of a rock band that has rendered the Southeastern United States with such pinpoint accuracy. Whenever I’m listening to the whaler, I can practically feel the August humidity pasting my shirt to my back while I mow my mother’s lawn at 9 am. The line “Grass scabs over cracks in your driveway” from “Sewn Together from the Membrane of the Great Sea Cucumber” could have been written while staring at my old carport torn up by tree roots.
That detail is just one example of lead singer and songwriter Bea MacDonald’s keen eye for the grotesque sutures holding 21st-century southern life together. Animal carcasses, the living dead, and brutally functional man-made structures dominate the imagery of the band’s first two records; part body horror and part post-apocalypse in their depictions of her home state. She’s acutely aware of the sins and contradictions foundational to certain subsets of the cultural landscape of America, but there’s an effort to understand in MacDonald’s writing that many would-be critics stop short of. Even as a trans woman alienated from her home by its government, there’s a warmth at war with the ugliness on display in her songs. That conflict is the beating heart of Hunting Season, guiding Home Is Where through their most winding, sensitive, and tangibly southern set of songs yet. Well, that and 13 different Elvis Presley impersonators’ lives flashing before their eyes as they die in the same massive car wreck.
If you’re confused on that last bit, don’t worry: Home Is Where have never been ones to let an outlandish concept interfere with their visceral emotional punch. “artificial grass” is the only track to name-drop the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll outright, but the focus is still on the pretender to the throne’s identity crisis and his dying revelation that “every king is a thief.” It’s also the only moment on the record where MacDonald’s scream is front and center, relying more than ever on her natural drawl to wring the emotion from these songs. For the majority of the record, guitarist Tilley Komorny trades emo tapping and fiery post-hardcore riffs for delicate pedal steel and fleet-fingered acoustic strumming. Even the electric tracks like lead single “migration patterns” have more in common with The Band or alt-country darlings Wednesday than they do with the band’s emo peers. This is by no means a betrayal of their scene: if anything, Hunting Season is the most themselves Home Is Where have ever been.
Photo by Texas Smith
The album offsets all these new sounds with a slew of recurring motifs from throughout the band’s catalog. Opening track “reptile house” echoes the whaler in both its folk-heavy sound and gruesome imagery, with fatal car crashes and suburban decay standing in sharp relief to the natural order. MacDonald literally self-immolates in a haunting refrain before once again bemoaning Western civilization’s unwillingness to let things die. “The end of the world is taking forever” from “daytona 500” has been simplified to the passive, “Oh! The end goes on and on and on,” as the band plays her out. It’s not the cheeriest start, but MacDonald spends the record’s thirteen songs scanning the most hostile backroads and small towns for signs of happiness, however hard their surroundings try to snuff that joy out.
Throughout Hunting Season, MacDonald identifies with drifters wandering through scenes of an American dream melted like plastic in the sun. “milk & diesel” features a philosophical exchange on memory and meaninglessness between two of history’s most infamous traitors, Pat Garrett and Judas himself, while “mechanical bull” sees MacDonald share her own take on meeting the devil at a crossroads. Tales of cowboys and outlaws have long brought comfort or at least a sense of self to those in exile, and that holds true even a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Many across the country, including MacDonald and Komorny, have been forced to either live a lie or leave the states where they were born and raised thanks to increasingly aggressive anti-trans legislation. When the former sings, “No matter where you go, you’re still on the run” on “the wolf man,” it’s enough to make someone whose own migration was more intentional feel a sting of homesickness.
Only someone who truly loves Florida could describe the state in all its strange glory. Everything from discarded McDonald’s bags, fire & brimstone billboards, and a gorilla advertising a Harley Davidson sale litter the medians of the album’s highway. It seems absurd or alien on paper, but each one of these sights reminds me of the biannual 8-hour drives down I-75 my family would make to Tampa for holidays. MacDonald describes these scenes with the same detached mix of wonder and bewilderment as a ten-year-old child viewing them from a backseat window, but also the fondness of an adult who’s lived around them, left, and come back. “stand-up special” captures these bittersweet memories like mosquitoes in sap, with Bea’s voice backed up by Shannon Taylor of awakebutstillinbed as they get stuck within their own warped scenes of Americana. The band glides through the song’s folksy bounce, halting only to devastate at the end with the revelation, “I’ve been exploding my whole life!”
If anything keeps the record’s spirits high, though, it’s Home Is Where’s unified efforts as a band to make the most impassioned and close-to-home music of their lives. Both “stand-up special” and its sister track right before, “black metal mormon,” are such breezes to listen to that it’s hard for my face not to break into a soft smile while listening. The embrace of songs structured around a strong chorus leads to some of the sweetest melodies the band has offered yet. “shenandoah” is a gorgeous torch song and the most direct nod yet to the band’s longtime muse Bob Dylan, harmonica and all. Even a song as layered in its heartbreak as “milk & diesel” gives Komorny the space to rip a solo worthy of Neil Young himself. The most furious jam comes on “roll tide,” a steady, slow burn more than half the length of the band’s first album. It begins slow and sparse, gradually building into a wall of dissonant guitars, rolling drums, and wordless shouts before unraveling into vocal samples by the very end.
The track was also the most impenetrable on the record to me. Not due to its length or a lack of hooks - the humming of the titular phrase was one of the first things from the record to get properly lodged in my brain - but maybe because of just how much I’ve heard those words. I spent my middle and high school years in Alabama, and I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times I heard “roll tide!” spoken, spat out, or screamed by devout college football fans during that time. It was meant as a rallying cry, but I could only register it as an ominous sign of domination. That perspective made this penultimate track read more as a dirge, and to be quite honest, for as good as the song is, it bummed me out. It wasn’t until several listens in that the verses began to reshape it for me.
I saw how the wind blew through
The trees and the leaves and the fruit
Were not movedWell, it dawns on me, it’s late enough
To call it morning; all we need
Is the light
These images paint a picture of perseverance and, if you dare, hope. In southern vernacular, ‘roll tide’ has outgrown its place as a sports team’s trademarked battle cry: it’s used to mean everything from “have a good day” to “keep carrying on.” So much so that during a recent visit with family, my partner, who grew up on the West Coast, was completely lost hearing it for the first time. I’m choosing to believe MacDonald has appropriated it further as a call of queer resilience in the places where it’s needed most and people understand it the least. If nothing else, this band got me to join in a chant of “roll tide” for the first time in my life, and that’s a miracle in and of itself.
For all the death, destruction, and bitter memories within, Hunting Season is not a record that wallows in defeat. Home Is Where identify resistance and community as the only ways forward, so we may as well all be from the same neighborhood. They kicked us out of the old one. To quote the coda that the band finally etched into wax in the final moments of the record: “Home Is Where forever.”
Wes Cochran is a Portland-based writer, worker, and listener. You can find them @wacochran on Instagram, via their email electricalmess@gmail.com, or navelgazing their way up and down South Portland.
