Review Summary: garn servo, want anythinggg???
Just quietly,
Home Life sounds like basement rock that’s ecstatic to find itself out of the basement and into the opening slot of a festival mainstage. Every guitar riff is hollow and fuzzy, cutting into that middle ground between summery and metallic like a Rolling Blackout Coastal Fever clone on even more acid. Which is fine; what Horror My Friend do, they do well: these are all songs that have developed from the same stampeding drum beat, the same gang chant about middle class ennui and exhaustion. It’s a trend which has been persisting since 2016’s
Stay In, Do Nothing, and I don’t mean to position this as something that works to the band’s detriment; when a song like
Rattled Bones is galvanized by the same forward momentum as songs written two years prior, of course we begin to understand and empathize with the stagnation that the lyrics impute, whilst also falling back into the comforting familiar.
(Disclaimer: i don’t think that Horror My Friend have done this deliberately. i don’t believe that a ramshackle garage rock band gives enough of a *** about continuity to exercise foresight across a two-year timeline -- which isn’t a point of critique, because that’s not the point of a band like this. the point is to write catchy songs -- songs bent out of shape by overdrive that pissed twenty-somethings can belt out in between skulling their eighth or ninth bottle of Coopers Pale for the night. i’ve already forgotten the lyrics to
DIYS, but if there ever was a rallying cry against the office cubicle,
DIYS would be it.)
I was at Savers (“the recycle superstore!”) the other day and stumbled across a second-hand Horror My Friend shirt that was selling for like $5. It felt oddly fitting because they seem like the type of band (and this seems like the type of album) that you love for about two weeks in the middle of summer before leaving it to collect dust in a playlist entitled “vibezzzz”. It’s an “oh yeah…that” record, but if it seems like I’m justifying myself a lot here it’s because I genuinely believe that the three-piece have, despite ‘evidence’ to the contrary, given us something fun and good and
enough with
Home Life. It doesn’t break ground, it just re-treads it gracefully, and its A-sides sound like they should be B-sides. Somehow that’s okay with me.
