Home is Where’s second album ‘the whaler’ presents a hellscape where every day is one of inescapable suffering, presented through gnashing, layered guitars, vocal screeches, and poetry all at once bitter, defeated, and effulgent.

Stream: “yes! yes! a thousand times yes!” – Home Is Where

Home is Where’s debut, I Became Birds, is… a peculiar debut.

It’s most salient quirk, perhaps above all else, is that it’s runtime falls just shy of twenty minutes. That, for many, would be regarded as the length of an EP, not a showpiece curtain-raiser. In fact, I myself have listened to several EPs of longer runtimes. This is unusual to some, maybe even disconcerting to others. But, what lies beneath are indications of a musicality that itself is even more unique.

The fact is, any more time would have been surplus to requirements. Thus is the efficacy of Bea Macdonald’s writing; early signs foretold that what Home is Where could do with expertise, is pack a punch in the briefest of boxing matches. Lyrics unspool tendrils dripping with bile, an armada of references and weaponised analogies, and unabashed sincerity, that whip and coil around the listener enforcing a shared experience. The imagistic metaphor of ‘birds’ itself, a linguistic foray along a well-tread and ripened orchard, details body dysmorphia in a vein similar to other celebrated transgender voices, such as can be found on Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head by Jordaan Mason and The Horse Museum.

The evocative, brutish and unreserved writing of I Became Birds rallied immense anticipation for the band’s eventual second full release; that, and Home is Where being attributed the accolade of archetypes of ‘fifth wave emo.’ To know that recognition and adulation have reached levels where newborn genres are being defined against the way your own sound evolves must be a dizzying prospect, if pondered too deeply. ‘Fifth wave emo’ is very much a coalescing of all things emo: Screamo vocals, profoundly emotional lyrics, layers of gossamer, midwest emo guitars, etc. This does indeed happen to be a Home is Where checklist.

So, with expectations at alpine levels, what do Home Is Where conjure? The answer is a dystopia where, in a twisted, woefully morbid version of Groundhog Day, every day is 9/11. Over and over. For eternity. With no escape, nor reprieve, nor solace. 9/11 is, naturally, a profoundly difficult topic to write about tactfully. The toll it has taken on a national, if not global conscience is still reverberating. For many, it is the most monumental tragedy of the 21^st Century, and to simply move on is not tenable.

Released June 16, 2023 via Wax Bodega, the whaler poses this conundrum: Is it possible to move on? Is it even moral to do so? Would doing so reduce such a cataclysmic disaster to a mere blemish in human history? Would it make us numb, or immune to such events, or to empathy, or would the energy to even care about such things at all diminish? Has life truly been irreconcilably changed by 9/11? Has it catalysed an age of constant tragedy and therefore an age of mundanity in the face of catastrophe, an age where desensitisation and exhaustion cancel out honest fear? Are we then at fault for feeling anything at all?

Bea Macdonald elucidates what the take of Home Is Where’s second album is, talking to Sonemic for Rate Your Music: “[9/11 is] more like an idea or a being than an event,” surely referring to the fact that, especially within the whaler, it lives on beyond one individual happening; it does not stop when the day ends, you wake up and the dread remains.

She continues, “I just see it as what happens after being inflicted with endless tragedy. The characters on the record are all different people, and at the same time, the same person. I don’t feel protected by the numbness, just bored and afraid.” A follow-up query might be: Afraid of further torment, or of what it’s doing to the person?

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Stream: ‘the whaler’ – Home Is Where

:: Inside The Whaler ::

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skin meadow

The album’s opening track bursts into life, guitars charging into each other frantically, disrupting the introductory, desolate soundscape, itself sounding like instruments slowly rupturing, or being dragged across a plane rendered inhospitable.

Lyrics here detail disembowelment without meaning, other than a striving for escape. ‘Skin meadow’ is chanted, staccato guitars backing the title’s repetition like a pointillist dotting the faces of every single mangled casualty that homogenises into that meadow of flesh. The chanting descends into screamo yelps, the horror of the situation too much to process.

In a world devoid of meaning, MacDonald begs to be forgiven ‘for giving a sh*t’, ‘looking forward to looking back on this’ perhaps a pipe dream in of itself. The song devolves into the sounds of a piano being gutted.

lily pad pupils

This is one of the truest synergies of fifth wave emo on the whole album. Alt. country sounds permeate the track, including suggestions of a slide guitar. Midwest emo riffs twinkle throughout. The track dissipates out to ringing open notes, leading onto some of MacDonald’s most visceral screams: ‘earn your urn’, a fatalist mantra barked ad infinitum. This song also features the first utterances of ‘I am the whaler.’

yes! yes! a thousand times yes!

You cannot fake love. The marriage ceremony at the centre of this track is doomed to be bungled, romance entirely vacant – it suffocates within a reality that reduces it to something meaningless. It is a decision made out of a futile hunt for normalcy, if anything. The energy of the song peaks as the minister residing over the marriage confirms the sacrament’s formation. It is vapid, and feels more akin to imprisonment. There are post-punk echoes within the song’s misleadingly chirpy riff.

whaling for sport

Lyrically, this track functions heavily on the efficacy of repetition. There is an ardent, stringent emphasis on dismissing the existence of a God. There is nothing beyond the sky, that absence of a deity effectively confirming that there is no one who can salvage anything: the people in charge are merely those floundering of earth, failing and dying over and over again.

Most notably, this track features a microwaved tape loop as its outro. This instance of avant-garde manipulation speaks to the general decay in quality of life of the figures that inhabit ‘The Whaler’, along with a decay of quality of mind.

everyday feels like 9/11

The title here speaks for itself. It is the album’s heaviest track, featuring extended, abrasive screamo vocal work. This track details the despondency of the album’s conceit. Everyday is dismal, repeating inexorably, Spiegel im Spiegel style, but the mirror is cracked and cuts like talons.

9/12

What follows is the most desolate track of the record. It is desperate, it is distant, it is sullen, it is mellow, it is, ultimately, defeated. A piano audibly thuds out a simple melody. A warbling, pitchy choir come together in solidarity, singing a protest song for a fight they know they cannot win. They finish, and the album continues.

daytona 500

The roads are littered with wastes of life. Roadkill proliferates, ‘fathers of drunk drivers plant a cross’ for their respective losses, and ‘severed antlers’ can be seen ‘wrapped around a fence’. Every contender has fallen, taking a silver medal in the contest of surviving this album’s reality. Even Dale Earnhardt is reduced to a rambling lunatic, ‘pushing a shopping cart’ and mumbling how ‘the first to lose the race always comes in second place’. This is the point – here, everyone is a loser. Sounds of smashing glass pepper the outro, signifying defeat, defeat, and more defeat.

chris farley

Speaking of Chris Farley, the majority of deaths in this universe must be premature. This track seems to broach genuine grief with trepidation, and like the corpses of friends, it is not long before it is masked by a pall of moss, leaves, rattlesnakes, and here, a threnody of guitars.

nursing home riot

MacDonald described this track, when talking to Consequence, as a collation of ‘well-meaning failures.’ The ground has become clogged with bodies, swimming pools encumbered by drowned insects. A hunter blushes when tasked with skinning his kill, and a television glares out from an apartment now abandoned. An organ wavers, bolstering harmonies to emotional breaking points. The song is structured like a classic Pixies number, palpitating between quiet and loud sections.

Amidst a blizzard-like, labyrinthine cascade of loss, dejection, and guitars, Macdonald harks: ‘I had to put down the dog today| Tell the children, he ran away,’ before a ripe, guttural, deeply poignant wretch.

floral organs

In the same conversation with Consequence, Macdonald explains that, in ‘The Whaler’, ‘things are falling apart and whales are offering themselves to harpoons that the narrator didn’t even know they were holding. The end of the world isn’t some grand event, it’s just another day’. The lyrical voice acknowledges their place as the whaler, but too vivisects themselves just to try and escape – they will kill and kill themselves if it means reprieve, but there will be no relish in any of it.

Elsewhere, MacDonald says to Alternative Press Magazine about the album’s conclusion: “I don’t feel like there’s any catharsis. The record literally doesn’t end, it just continues to loop and loop and loop until you decide it’s over… it comes across hopeless.” The album does exist in such a state of unsalvageable despondency, but even still, it ends with a key image. As Macdonald says to Consequence, as the lyrical voice and another damned character spit teeth at each other, “It ends exactly like it began. Somehow smiling.”

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:: stream/purchase The Whaler here ::

:: connect with Home Is Where here ::

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the whaler

an album by Home Is Where