For their third studio album, “Goodness” the Massachusetts group Hotelier took the approach, turning their attention to the unknowns of the here-and-now and crafting a sprawling work of art that aims to capture life at its most mundane as well as its most thrilling. The result sounds like something that finally lives up to emo’s name because genuine emotion doesn’t always express itself at volumes dialed up to 11. Tracks like the gut-punching “Opening Mail for My Grandmother” take on the theme of death, and vocalist-bassist Christian Holden finds himself reflecting on what comes next with the same lyrical skill he once employed to look backwards in time. It may not be the band’s most rousing work to date, but it’s certainly their best and most engaging.
“Listen more, speak less,” Christian Holden recently commented on social media in anticipation of his band’s forthcoming new album. These seemed like strange words coming from Hoteliers notorious frontman.
Goodness, the Worcester, Massachusetts indie-punk outfit’s bracingly human, paradigm-shifting third album opens with a recitation of a spoken-word poem. “I see the moon, the moon sees me,” Holden reads calmly. “I would smile but it would be meaningless. I wouldn’t want it to be.” You can almost hear the eyeballs begin to roll as the band cited off the first track that kicks off their new album with a poem.
Granted, it’s hard to fault anyone for shrugging off the so-called rebirth of a scene that quickly became both fairly and unfairly synonymous with entitled navel-gazing, arrested development and, uh, crying. Sure, it was a surprise that the Hotelier’s 2014 sophomore effort, Home Like No Place Is There was embraced by rock fans of all stripes, that passionate, melodically inclined guitar music seemed worthy of people’s attention again.
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The Fat Angel Sings 