Home Blitz, All Through The Year (Sophomore Lounge, 2020)
I used to not like Home Blitz. It took me years of going back to their album Foremost and Fair (on mp3) and asking myself “why do I keep listening to this if I don’t like it?”. And then one day I realized how great it was, on the subway, going back home after visiting my girlfriend. I was happy, and the album's leftfield pop with the peculiarly affected vocals, weird interludes and baroque structures suddenly made sense.
Home Blitz's latest EP follows in the style of the LP but pushes the weirdness even further, which is great. The four songs represent the seasons. Summer is “What We Were”, a shard of perfect jangle-pop clocking in at barely a minute and still managing to include a slice of 12-string magic, an earworm of a hook and a couple of unexpected turns towards ambient noise.
The Autumn song, “Final Decay”, is a slightly creepy Halloween tale that, in perfect Home Blitz fashion, mixes guitar pop, spoken word weirdness, a 808 electronic beat and heavy metal distortion complete with an arresting solo at the end without losing its catchiness. And then Winter comes in the form of “What I Say I Mean”, a chilly tune built on bells and singsongy, well, Christmas-y vocals.
Side B is fully devoted to Spring, aka “Real Green”, the weirdest of the bunch: 9 and a half minutes of a sprawling, chorus-less folk song mainly played on piano and fiddle that could be a traditional Irish chant if it weren’t for its free-form construction and its rambling lyrics.
Not being able to capture the puzzling essence of a creature such as Daniel DiMaggio’s Home Blitz in a few words, I made the horrible mistake of trying to describe the songs in detail, which for my own taste is the sign of a bad review. I’m not sure all this eclecticism is well suited for a EP, running the risk of alienating people who aren’t already familiar with the band and don’t know how to contextualize these songs. I think I’d recommend listening to some of the band’s prior output before delving into All Through The Year. But when you do it’s gonna be a peach of a trip around the sun.
Click here to listen to All Through The Year on Bandcamp.
Follow GRRAWR on Instagram to get a record review every Wednesday in your IG feed.
