Home Front – Watch It Die Review

If I were the kind of person who felt the need to justify what I write about on this particular website to some imaginary naysaying ombudsman, then covering the second album from Edmonton, Alberta’s Home Front might have me sweating like a frightened right-winger trying to decide which cactus shape on the restroom doors at a Tex-Mex restaurant most closely matches the shape of their own confused genitals. Friends, I am not that kind of person, and you do not need to be that concerned about other people’s bathroom business.

It is, however, an unassailable truth that Home Front is not a metal band and Watch It Die is not a metal album. If those are important criteria for your enjoyment of their music, kindly point your ears and eyeballs elsewhere, and I hope you have a wonderful day. This is not the first time Home Front has graced the halls of Last Rites, but admittedly I did not give them the clearest of introductions last time when I wrote “Home Front, like Leonard Cohen, are Canadian, but it is a very large country and it is rude of you to draw any other conclusions. Games of Power is the Edmonton (mostly) duo’s first album… and the entire reason I went down a silly Leonard Cohen rabbit hole is that Home Front play a compelling new version of several very old styles. The basic frame here is post-punk, but there are aspects of goth, punk, new wave, and synthpop…”

Mackinnon’s vocals are mostly either a rabble-rousing street punk shout or a nostalgically mannered croon, and his strings are never flashy, but they cut directly to the point and then drive it home. Frazier’s percussion and synths are hugely varied across the album, but even though there are sharp tonal differences, the album still feels of a piece with itself, so whether the drum machine is pounding an intentionally chintzy basic rhythm or the synths are thrumming with widescreen settings, the focus is always on the full mise en scene rather than any individual brushstroke.

As I’ve suggested, Home Front’s music dabbles in goth, Oi!/street punk, new wave, post-punk, and just good goddamned rock and roll. (For the latter, take a gander at the fleeting Born to Run vibe on the opening of “Always This Way.”) But the extremely particular thing that this album feels closest to for me is New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies. Like that album, Watch It Die manages to feel unified even though it has at least two parts trying to run in opposite directions: in one direction, a guitar- or bass-led rock direction with synth underpinnings, and in another direction, a keyboards- and programming-drenched synthetic music with the faint echo of non-electrified instruments. 

This means that Watch It Die is home to the sneering, synthwave drive of “New Madness,” but also the old-school New Model Army vibe of “For the Children (Fuck All),” the latter of which sports a fist-pumping chorus that even the driver of the car next to you on your next morning commute won’t be able to get out of their head. “Dancing with Anxiety” is built around a bouncy guitar riff, but the synths and electronic beats give it a harder-edged industrial angle like the agitprop EBM of Front 242, and “Young Offender” follows it up with a speedy cyber-pun bruiser that sounds a little bit like if early Ministry crash-landed into a Swingin’ Utters gig. The rock/post-punk direction is just as aptly represented, though, with beautiful earworms like the title track, “Eulogy,” “Always This Way,” “Light Sleeper,” and even the sparse, yearning middle ground of “The Vanishing.”

Do you have those songs in your life that just, for whatever reason, always feel right in some deep, elemental way? My personal litany covers things like U2’s “New Year’s Day,” Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” Sleater-Kinney’s “Entertain,” The Stooges’ “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell,” Blondie’s “One Way or Another,” Alabama Shakes’ “Gimme All Your Love,” Thin Lizzy’s “That Woman’s Gonna Break Your Heart,” and – I’m certain – approximately eight thousand others. But… what is that? What is that thingness of these songs that makes them so much more than the weight of their words or the measure of their meter? How is it that some music can reach into the quivering pulp of our flesh, cut through our armor and excuses, and simply see us, wholly and without flinching? Watch It Die feels to this particular knucklehead listener like every one of its songs is cut from this same aspirational cloth. Maybe Home Front has just tapped into a frequency that vibrates my ribcage sonorously like a fingertip circling the lip of a wineglass, like their melodies are just exactly the ones I expected to hear, or that their lyrics – fragmentary, pugilistic, prosaic, bruised – are what I thought I have been saying all along, but it all coalesces beautifully into an album that I truly can’t stop playing.

If I had to pick a phrase to encapsulate the overriding emotional core of Watch It Die, it might be something like “desperately hopeful.” In fact, the chorus to sneaky early highlight “Light Sleeper” gives us a nice key to unlock the attitude carried by this album:

We’re born alone / we die alone
We’re born alone / we die alone
Don’t ever think you have to / live alone

It opens with a feint at brittle punk nihilism, but turns it around into sincerity. What they’re saying is, we mostly can’t control how we enter and when we exit, but we can damn sure choose how to live while we’re living. Watch It Die closes on the stunning, wistful “Empire,” which rides a Disintegration-style synth melody and a spare, elegiac guitar lead into the kind of ambiguous sunset that makes it clear that our future – in all its madcap, dizzying ungraspability  – is what we make of it.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

All Posts