Review Summary: Welcome home...
“I hear the water drip from the faucet.
It's sweetly falling in tune.
I'm gently closing the closet.
And I fall to the floor,
and crawl to my room.
The thought of ending it soon...
Just let me sleep in my room.
...
Mother I'm so scared.
Empty bed and all of the sheets are gone,
They're wrapped around me and you.
All is quiet but the drop of my gun.
I want to belong...to someone...
But maybe life's not for everyone”
- “Black Orchid” (1998)
For the better half of the twenty years which Blue October has existed as a collective the band has been a constant vessel for the unfortunate turns in life faced by frontman Justin Furstenfeld. From the bleak passages of suicidal romanticism on
The Answer to the un-quenched depravity of human thought on
Any Man in America, any selected point in the Blue October discography has been no stranger from a tell-all look into the ups and downs of Justin’s private life, free of any censorship and smoldering of gritty details. Perhaps this has always been the most endearing quality of Blue October. Their music has always subverted the dramatic and over-bloated teenage angst that fueled the heyday of mainstream alternative rock, an antithesis of sorts with songwriting for a nervous and admittedly embarrassing insight to glamour-absent moments of depression, suicide, and bipolar episodes.
With each album in the band’s career presenting itself as a chapter in Justin’s life, something briefly mentioned in his live record
Songs from an Open Book, their newest record,
Home, is a chapter previously unseen from the band’s history: Happiness.
Home is a record that oozes from the edges with overwhelming joy, a development previously spotted on their 2013 record,
Sway. Out from the ashes of a life struggle with drugs, alcoholism, suicidal thoughts, and custody battles and into the arms of a new wife and family, Justin has settled down from his previously bleak outlook of life into one of the most unabashedly happiest albums of 2016.
“I can’t wait, to see what’s around the corner...", Justin proclaims on
Home’s title track, a slow moving ambiance of acoustic guitar and a quick boom-clap chorus. Justin faces the next chapter of his life head on unafraid with joy through a genuine barrage of warm, alternative rock cuts. The album follows a concrete mixture of warm, guitar heavy atmosphere and brief instances into newer territory like the electronic/soul hybrid
Break Ground. Songs such as
Coal Makes Diamonds and
I Want It bounce about with a bright, sunny feel of heavy piano rock mimicking the “sounds from the desert” which Justin recalls from his time touring in the desert.
The album is heavy in positive vibes, with what few instances that Justin uses to reflect on his past life spun back into a bright outlook for the future. Perhaps some may find Justin’s enthusiasm suffocating at times, with
Shake it Up and
Houston Heights illustrating the gaudiness getting too out of hand, but for the rest we can rejoice in a collection of songs illustrating the completion of a voyage through a twenty year storm to the bright, welcoming embrace of the next day.
Welcome home, Justin Furstenfeld.
"Look forward to the breakdown,
Pay attention to the worst, the uneducated fail rate when they said this wouldn't hurt.
So You fake it till you make it, consistency the yoke
If You live like someone's watching you
You'll be the egg that never broke .”
- “Time Changes Everything” (2016)
