For the most part, “Hunting Season” is a full-blown alt-country album, an album that probably wouldn’t get referred to as “emo” at all–save for the Midwest-y riffs and screamo parts of “Artificial Grass”–if not for Home Is Where’s roots in the scene. It’s heavy on strummy acoustic guitars, Dylanesque harmonica, soaring pedal steel and dobro (by Dan Potthast of Jeff Rosenstock’s band and MU330), earthy vocal harmonies (from Bea and awakebutstillinbed‘s Shannon Taylor), and some countrified piano (by Evan Bailey).
Bea MacDonald wanted to make a record “that you could grill to but also cry to… not cry, just feel something.” As a band who adopted the “fifth wave emo” categorization early on, “Home Is Where are part of a scene that’s full of great crying/feeling-something records, but emo grilling records? Those are harder to come by. Enter: Hunting Season. As everyone from Beyoncé to Lana Del Rey to Post Malone to Julien Baker have been finding ways to embrace country music, Home Is Where found comfort in fellow Florida-born artist Gram Parsons and his band The Flying Burrito Brothers while they were out on tour and missing their swampy hometown (a town that Bea and guitarist Tilley Komorny no longer live in due to Florida’s treatment of trans people).
As Bea puts it, Parsons “mixed country rock and roll, which is what we were doing–we wanted to mix punk and country and all kinds of different stuff and have it be poetry.”
Bea’s half-yelled vocal delivery reflects the band’s punk-informed DNA, and the harder stuff shines through in other ways too, like with the high-octane riffs of “Bike Week” (which Tilley says were inspired by Lonesome Crowded West-era Modest Mouse) and the noise freakout at the end of the 10-minute “Roll Tide.” From where I’m standing, “Hunting Season” looks like fifth wave emo’s answer to Meat Puppets II; it’s a swampy, noisy, country/punk crossover that suits today’s DIY scene in the same delightfully strange way that that album suited the SST era. And as that band have done for their entire career, I expect “Hunting Season” is gonna confound some listeners. Even in a time when artists are going country left and right, Home Is Where’s oddball approach to the genre is like pretty much nothing else.
“Migration Patterns” is out now, off of Home Is Where’s upcoming album, Hunting Season, out May 23rd.
The Fat Angel Sings 