You already know that a song with the title “Everyday Feels Like 9/11” is not meant to be taken literally. Frontwoman of Home Is Where Brandon MacDonald was in primary school when the Twin Towers collapsed, making it doubtful that he or she had a clear understanding of the events of that day, which was actually just September 11, 2001 for most adults on the East Coast. I had enough time in Charlottesville on a blindingly sunny Tuesday morning to attend a 9AM lecture, buy The Blueprint, and discuss the A+ review I was going to submit when I ran into my newspaper editor at the gym. My friends and I panicked when the terrible gravity of the situation finally hit us. We called our parents, prayed for the people we knew who were working in Washington, DC, and – because we started drinking almost immediately – felt an odd, completely unprecedented rush of patriotic pride before we passed out. The next morning, we awoke hoping that classes would be canceled.
However, the explosive “Everyday Feels Like 9/11” is followed by a piano interlude when everyone returns to work on September 12 and the day before becomes 9/11 in the middle of Home Is when’s second album. The date originally stood for an immediate future in which all attempt at reflection on American exceptionalism would be destroyed by an animal thirst for swift revenge.
What was formerly seen as a dragnet for Al-Qaeda is now likely to catch protesters in Cop City. It is now believed to be the start of an ongoing era in which our two political parties will have absolutely no common ground, save when it comes to supporting an everlasting War on Terror that is becoming more and more ill-defined. Being the only America MacDonald has ever truly known, she doesn’t need to be a geopolitical expert to discuss how 9/11 changed the country.
Warped tape effects at the beginning and end of The Whaler symbolize its message as much as any of MacDonald’s impressionistic wordplay: for the past 22 years, America has been caught in a disintegration loop of atrocity, anger, and absurdity that has gotten so compressed and degraded that it no longer even requires these things to occur in chronological order. Remember how George W. Bush was hailed as a model of compassionate conservatism for delaying the start of military action in Afghanistan for 26 days? As trans women, MacDonald and co-songwriter Tilley Komorny might be detained for using the restroom when they return home, Florida, the state of Home Is Where, has transformed into an experimental prison of preventative, punitive measures based on no real transgression.
The lived experience of MacDonald and Komorny as trans women continues to form the basis of Home Is Where’s point of view, albeit more subtly than it did on 2021’s I Became Birds. In particular, their historic breakup with fellow trans firebrands Record Setter serves as a dissection lesson (see: the climactic “Names” lyric, “I’m a woman, suck my dick”). I Became Birds was the first exciting emo album since, say, the Hotelier’s Home, Like NoPlace Is There, to feel truly visionary. It marked the entry of a charismatic, confrontational voice who risked immediate backlash and challenged the genre to reconsider its prevailing assumptions.
Organizing the different micro-scenes that had emerged during the epidemic and expressing her love and appreciation for her colleagues weren’t the only motivations behind MacDonald’s 2021 taxonomy of the fifth wave of emo. A call to evolve or die was the main message despite possible selective and reductive mockery of the previous emo resurgence in the attacks on Modern Baseball and Title Fight. Since then, almost every good band in the genre has deviated from the stereotype of “straight guys with capos and Telecasters.”
Even though Home Is Where’s Goodness is my favorite album of the last ten years, I hesitate to compare it to The Whaler because, despite its widespread praise in more mainstream circles, Goodness was met with a chillier reception from emo diehards who mostly seemed to want another “Your Deep Rest.” The Whaler is more than twice as long as its predecessor, which, with its 18 minutes, managed to cram so many hooks and intensity that few people could dispute Home Is Where’s claim that it was a six-song album. The bristly, brash anthems are still present; the lead single, “yes! yes! a thousand times yes!” is two songs in one, with a soaring post-rock act called Home is Where interjecting the catchy and dejected dance-punk groove. But in a music that has expanded and become more distinctive, these moments are less important.
The album’s opening track, “Skin Meadow,” uses its title as a gang vocal chant, a playground insult, and a temper tantrum while introducing the major lyrical theme of hallucinogenic bodily horror. The song “Lily Pad Pupils” links Home Is Where’s extremes—backwoods country and blackened screamo—with a somber, banjo-flecked middle that conjures Panhandle gloom without using Deliverance clichés. Similarly, “Daytona 500″‘s opening half makes Home Is Where sound like Wednesday’s strange Florida relatives before their filthy alt-country gives way to a dizzying thicket of tremolo guitars that feature MacDonald’s most famous quote: “The end of the world is taking forever.”
Thought of Cap’n Jazz on Elephant 6, a rerouted emo history that runs from Bob Dylan to Tim Kinsella to Isaac Brock to Jeff Mangum, a playfulness that turns both grumpy and bizarre, is the elevator pitch for Home Is Where, yet it still rings true. Their chosen instruments, like corroded harmonicas, dusty theremins, and acoustic guitars run through distortion pedals, highlight MacDonald’s fascination with death’s stink as proof of life. The Whaler is no exception. When drunk drivers are scraped off the roadside, they resemble possums; antlers that have been removed are used as home decor; human entrails are entwined in tree branches; pigeon droppings and stale communion crackers litter the countryside; Dead racoons are dragged out of the garbage, and dead people emerge from Florida’s disappearing marshes. It’s getting harder and harder to live or die with any type of dignity in Home Is Where’s region.
What does all of this have to do with 9/11, given that Home Is Where has talked a fine game about the idea here? The Whaler doesn’t focus on 9/11 in particular, any more than The Holocaust was the subject of the album In The Aeroplane Over the Sea; it served as the thematic unifier for a surrealistic, folky punk (but not folk-punk) masterpiece about humanity’s quest for meaning in the face of its most heinous excess and frequently, its failure.
Although Neutral Milk Hotel’s limitless romanticism would always appeal to teenagers, that project was shielded by Elephant 6’s utopian collectivism and their relegation of human cruelty to the distant past. However, MacDonald is writing about a time period from which she hails, one in which Mangum’s idealistic view and wish to live off the grid may come out as outmoded or even foolish. In what sounds like The Whaler’s thesis statement, MacDonald yells, “This counterfeit reality/ A perfect copy of a forgery/ And after all these years, I still look a lot like me,” a pessimist and shitposter at heart who finds little in their lifetime worth saving.
On I Became Birds, Home Is Where might have appeared to be idealists, compressing an entire decade of transformative experience – escaping Scientology, shuttling in and out of mental hospitals as a teen, transitioning genders – into galvanizing music of constant momentum, its vivid, lysergic language expressing the feeling captured by another Floridian, trans-punk icon: “There’s a brave new world that’s raging inside of me.” The Whaler is an immovable declaration of equal and opposing power by MacDonald, who is surveying a terrified, backwards nation that is collapsing in front of everyone.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Queens Of The Stone Age’s In Times New Roman…
• King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation
• Killer Mike’s Michael
• Hand Habits’ Sugar The Bruise
• Terrace Martin’s Fine Tune
• Boris & Uniform’s Bright New Disease
• Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ King Of A Land
• Kool Keith’s Black Elvis 2
• Deer Tick’s Emotional Contracts
• Bonny Doon’s Let There Be Music
• Fust’s Genevieve
• Man On Man’s Provincetown
• Django Django’s Off Planet
• Jack River’s Endless Summer
• Maisie Peters’ The Good Witch
• SunYears’ Come Fetch My Soul!
• Rodeo Boys’ Home Movies
• Creep Show’s Yawning Abyss
• Meshell Ndegeocello’s The Omnichord Real Book
• Creeping Death’s Boundless Domain
• Bettye LaVette’s ‘LaVette!
• Son Volt’s Day Of The Doug
• Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet’s STROBE.RIP
• May Rio’s French Bath
• Royal Thunder’s Rebuilding The Mountain
• Burt Hussell’s High Desert
• Ben Howard’s Is It?
• Pelicanman’s Planet Chernobyl
• Asake’s Work Of Art
• She’s Goodpaster
• Gloorp’s Gloorp
• Peter Lewis’ Imagination
• Gov’t Mule’s Peace…Like A River
• Gracie Abrams’ Good Riddance (Deluxe)
• Wild Up’s Julius Eastman Vol. 3: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?
• Pet Shop Boys’ SMASH – The Singles 1985-2020
• Bright Eyes’ Cassadaga: A Companion, The People’s Key: A Companion, and Noise Floor (Rarities 1998-2005): A Companion
• Drive-By Truckers’ The Complete Dirty South
• Texas’ The Very Best Of 1989 – 2023
• Spoon’s Memory Dust EP
• waterbaby’s Foam EP
• Clearbody’s Bend Into A Blur EP
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