Review Summary: just spit it out
Emo is a weird genre. It appeals to a very specific demographic, and has a lot of trouble crossing out of that, from my experience. It took me years to get it, personally. My brother was into it when he was a teenager, quite a few of my friends were, but it never really stuck out to me. I think part of why is because I’m not a very angry person naturally. I have become more so in the past year or so, but I still find that it’s easy to see through it to the sadness behind. When I listen to most emo, I find too much anger and not enough honesty about the root cause. But recently, I finally broke into the genre. This is where it happened.
From my experience, the best music is almost always the kind that crosses over from one style or audience to another.
Home, Like Noplace Is There is some of that for me. I still don’t know much about emo, but I can now say that I have listened to hours of it, and most of that was just
Home. I think it has something that is missing from a lot of music. There are genuine issues here, largely some of the worst things people have to deal with. They are expressed with a rare sense of honesty – one hook tells the story of someone who couldn’t get himself to go to a friend’s funeral. It’s a confessional, one where anyone who listens is privy to some of the things people only ever tell each other in the dead of night.
One band I find myself thinking about a lot in relation to the Hotelier is the Antlers, specifically
Hospice. Both albums deal with the consequences of mental illness and abuse. But where
Hospice seemed like a reluctant, slow, building purge,
Home is like the members of the Hotelier are shoving these dark stories down listeners’ ears, often before we even realize how bad they are. Instead of a one on one conversation, they “open the curtains” and present everything, act by act. As a result, it suffers a little. The follow-ups to lines like “I couldn’t recognize your shell” deserve a little more attention. Instead, we hear the voice of someone who hasn’t really accepted the true terror of a problem, even if they’re willing to acknowledge it briefly. I don’t know if I can really blame them, though. These are awful things to deal with. Maybe it’s easier or even healthier to just strum and bang after comparing a human being to a housebroken dog, or another person taking their life, as a way of keeping the mind somewhere away from total despair. I can’t say I wouldn’t react the same way. I’d like to think that cries of pure feeling are what really helps us heal, but I don’t know enough about the darkest side to say that for sure.
Besides that, maybe a completely open expression of despair would have been too much to express what they were really trying to say. Not many people would have listened to
Home if it wasn’t, outside of the lyrics and a certain underlying sense of ambience, a traditional emo album. It needs that hook to really stick to the mainstream reality most of us face. There is something healthy about holding on to that. People in the darkest spots in life can show the rest of us that it is survivable, and can almost show us how much it hurts, and this is how I see the Hotelier. They are messengers from a horrifying part of life, where mourning is the default state and the deaths never really stop. They have reached out to us, showing us their suffering in the way anyone can understand, to the audience that would be most likely to listen. If we can get anything from the album, it is that nothing is unspeakable and that there are terrors out there, more than we can see with the naked eye. In every track, we learn again that the awful reality is not just in their heads.
