When Christian Holden sang, "My younger years were something, but that isn’t my life" on the Hotelier’s Home Like NoPlace Is There, most listeners had little reason to think that the line was autobiography. By the time Holden arrives to that line on "Housebroken", he’s shifted perspectives from a quizzical, concerned narrator to a dog that’s actually a person that’s actually a metaphor for the part of ourselves that legitimizes societal complacency. More importantly, a good number of people who heard the Hotelier’s breakthrough LP had no idea its predecessor, It Never Goes Out, even existed. And, "My younger years were something, but that isn’t my life" more or less sums up the fraught relationship the Hotelier have with their debut—while it’s a strong record whose songs are still included in their live sets, they’re just barely able to recognize the people who made it.
In a literal sense, the Hotelier did not make It Never Goes Out. The Hotel Year did. Moreover, the record was written when the band members were between the age of 16 and 18, living at home and struggling to be heard. After digitally self-releasing the record, the band signed to Mightier Than Sword, a punk label which Holden has maligned as predatory and underhanded at worst and defunct at best. While it’s reasonable to see the reissue of a four-year old album as a victory lap after HLNPIT’s out-of-nowhere success, Tiny Engines is also ensuring that people can actually own a physical copy of It Never Goes Out for the first time.
Heard again, It Never Goes Out does sound like the product of its environment, and those arriving to this record in 2015 will likely be startled by the youth of its creators—the word "buttface" is used in two different songs. Thematically, It Never Goes Out is guided by the most teenaged, punk perspective in existence: rejecting the expectations of middle-class suburbia and realizing the capacity for your own disillusion and disapproval. Holden’s tools are rudimentary here: not just Beatles ("Lonely Hearts Club") and the Smiths ("Title Track (There is a Light)") references, but some of the most common ones. Walmart and Hallmark are castigated for co-opting love. Volumes of Nietszche and Thoreau are namechecked. Holden sneers, "We’re all actors" and the opener states "Our Lives Would Make A Sad, Boring Movie". Earnest, blowtorch-intense convictions like these are something of an occupational hazard for a young punk band, and when It Never Goes Out isn't skirting cliche, it's embracing it with a bear hug.
But these songs power through any sophomoric tendencies because even in their earliest days, the Hotelier were an unusually theatrical and ambitious punk rock band—these are songs you want to act out while singing. "An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club" and "Title Track (There Is a Light)" in particular are fully-formed Hotelier compositions that allow Holden’s rangy, expressive vocals free rein. They have already figured out how group chants and guitar solos can help "anti-bro" sentiments play well in a gym, a trait that distinguishes the band as the only mosh-pit/group-hug facilitators to rival Titus Andronicus and Japandroids over the last few years.
That said, It Never Goes Out is a debut that registers more deeply in retrospect knowing what it leads to, particularly when it hints at what might have inspired HLPNIT’s most cathartic moments. During "An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club", Holden and a friend bond while committing petty, destructive acts around a construction site, "Until the night when it got way too serious/ And you showed me your damaged wrists...And if I had only known that it would be the last time we'd be on that level with one another/ I would have never let you go." It was a startling revelation then; three years later, it’s a possible connection to the suicides explored on "Dendron" and "Your Deep Rest". The album rides out on a glorious, call-and-response blaze, and it conveys a sweetness the Hotelier may never recapture. Four years later, it will always stand as the best album of the Hotel Year, the promising, awkward and strident band who labeled their music the work of "devotional kids".
