Review Summary: A Home for You lets your mind float away just far enough to explore the ether, before carrying you soundly back home.
There’s a particular quality that can be found in certain musical works; one constituent of what makes this art form so special to me. It’s also something that lends itself nicely to my appreciation for post-rock and progressive rock music. It’s the sense of traversal. Or the “Fellowship of the Ring” effect. Some albums convey this almost unexplainable feeling of traversal -- of journeying across a vast landscape -- and it tends to be those albums that captivate me the most. Explosions in the Sky’s 2003 and 2007 albums achieve this (particularly the song “It’s Natural to Be Afraid”); as does Echotide’s 2012 masterpiece ‘As Our Floodlights Gave Way to Dawn’. There’s a sense of overcoming, to wade through a long passage of ambient nothingness; to emerge squinty-eyed at the dawn of the bright light that gleams from the looming melody on the other side. Long, almost non-musical ambience gradually soothes and bewilders a mind slowly declining into semi-consciousness. It’s in these movements that my thoughts start to wander into dream-like territories. And then, as the melodies ascend, I begin to awake, questioning where the last 10-20 minutes went, and giving up on trying to figure out how many songs had passed or how i even got to this point.
This is a quality that I think Good Weather for an Airstrike understands better than most. The music under this moniker is never over-encumbered with intrusive melodies and refrains, nor is it interminably quiet. There’s a balance struck that enables numerous transitions between the two states of semi-consciousness and apperceptive enjoyment. Truth be told I do enjoy the quiet, almost perpetual droning more than I do the lifting melodies that are found on this album (the closing track, “Welcome Home”, is my undeniable favourite here), but there is a deserved place for the latter, with tracks such as the beautiful “A Song for Libby” serving as respites from the detached haze. There are definitely more melodies and standout moments here than on Good Weather for an Airstrike’s landmark album “Underneath the Stars”, although it doesn’t hypnotise me quite as profoundly as that album did and still does. But “Underneath the Stars” is a glistening gem in the vast ocean of ambient music, and “A Home for You” justly lives up to the Good Weather for an Airstrikes name. This album lets your mind float away just far enough to explore the ether, before carrying you soundly back home.
I actually wrote it years ago, but felt like I'd start to touch up some of my old reviews to post on this site.
