On the opening track of the Hotelier’s sophomore record, Home, Like Noplace Is There, Christian Holden is a man of many words: 288 of them, to be exact. And they’re all secondary to two crucial, non-verbal moments that are nowhere to be found on the lyric sheet. Heraldic horns pipe up over a waltz of cyclic, clean guitars and sustained electric organ, right before Holden sings to a friend on the ledge, “Just remember when you’d call me to come/Take a deep breath and then jump.” And the rest of the band punctuates it with a perverse, celebratory “whoa-oh-oh!” This brief moment of release dies down and after three and a half minutes of Holden twisting the same melody until it’s about to snap, his last words are “the pills that you gave didn’t do anything/I just slept for years on end” and then he gasps. What comes next is the agony of defeat, and the full-band crash is inevitable and knee-buckling every time. For the final minute, Holden is inconsolable in his failure, barely intelligible as he yells, “Grab a hold/I know I said to not/But what the fuck do I know?” and seconds later, the track cuts out abruptly. The name of this song is “An Introduction to the Album,” and is it fucking ever.
Home, Like Noplace Is There burns with the same five-alarm intensity throughout its nine songs, and the few times where the Worcester band are at a loss for words, they have no trouble expressing themselves. There isn’t a single moment of passive listening here because the relationships that fill Holden’s songs require 24/7-surveillance; they’re toxic and codependent, with people who “try to make chaos external” and are “killing the self to protect it from harm.” If there isn’t an emergency intervention or a 3 a.m. phone call that must be answered, a funeral is likely to follow. The specifics are removed, but there are lockdowns, pills, fleeting glimmers of hope, broken promises, and people who are just plain fucked to give you an idea of what’s at stake.
This all makes for common subject matter in rock music, especially within the Hotelier’s emotive punk rock. Home derives its gut-wrenching power from Holden’s narrator being someone who’s barely escaped the same tragedies, speaks the language of its victims, and is pulled between knowing that his friends and family may be beyond help and the moral and spiritual drive to be the better man. In “The Scope of All of This Rebuilding,” kinship and resentment are inseparable as Holden spits over barbed, clashing guitars, “You cut your ropes, left the umbilical.” Not caring and caring too much hurt equally, and these songs ache with guilt and real remorse. During “Your Deep Rest,” Holden can’t bring himself to attend the subject’s funeral; in the first chorus he’s merely uncomfortable, the second time around, “the sight of your family made me feel responsible.”
And yet, if you ignore the lyrics, “Your Deep Rest” is a shambling, shuffling piece of soaring pop-rock that could sneak onto any Clear Channel playlist. Home, Like Noplace Is There is emotionally relentless, but a relentlessly catchy record as well. Holden’s voice holds true to emo’s standards—passionate enough to aspire to the high notes, lacking the training and polish to hit them—though it’s malleable enough to fit within just about every variant of punk that’s gone overground. You get rousing group chants, call-and-response hooks, and collegiate jangle sliced and diced with Fugazi’s precision (“The Scope of All of This Rebuilding”) and an abrupt turn towards double-time, folkish punk of Against Me! or the Weakerthans (“In Framing”), and that’s just within five minutes.
For all of its song-by-song diversity, Home, Like Noplace Is There is constructed as a whole to mirror the endless cycle of abuse and relapse—a key lyric from “In Framing” puts it it right out there, “You retraced the same shape/Cut up and resewn/When you felt abandoned, when you felt alone.” It’s not a narrative, though each stylistic shift can serve as a plot twist. Holden manages some sense of composure during the stately first half of “An Introduction to the Album” and “In Framing,” and loses it during “The Scope of All of This Rebuilding” and the impulsively raging “Life in Drag.” The most desperate choruses are the most anthemic, as on near power-ballads “Discomfort Revisited’ and “Among the Wildflowers,” Holden recognizes what his suffering friends never do: the futility of trying to get through this alone.
Theatrical closer “Dendron” takes its title from the Greek word for “tree” and ties back to the arboreal imagery of “Your Deep Rest,” as well as its chorus with a gut-wrenching admission (“Part of your charm is the way you would push me from/All of the traps that I just couldn’t see/Figures the one that would trip you up/Would be the one that was set there by me”). Home ends with a transposed version of the melody from “An Introduction to the Album,” and it’s a brief respite, not a happy ending or even an ending. It just puts you right back where you started, prepared to fight another day.
Home, Like Noplace Is There is very much an album that works its ass off; it can’t afford to do otherwise, as the Hotelier battle addiction, ignorance, and their own past. The first line finds a flock of singing birds telling Holden to “tear the buildings down,” perhaps referring to their auspicious debut as the Hotel Year, which was beset by scene politics and industry bullshit to the point where they’re writing it out of their history to an extent. And the Hotelier are fighting against the real possibility of this record failing to reach its intended audience. Towards the end of that missive, Holden shrugs at being “emo now," knowing that word could scare away self-identifying indie rock and punk fans even though this is where you’ll find nearly all of the passionate, lyrical and hooky guitar bands on independent labels with personality, basement-show ethics and big-tent ambitions these days.
But sonically, politically, and ethically, the Hotelier are punk as fuck and perhaps in turn, Home, Like Noplace There Is can occasionally sound more exciting and unstable than “masterful.” There are slip-ups—“Housebroken” is overwrought with metaphor, and there are times when the muddy production can’t quite support their arrangements—but ones that let you know they’re only beginning to realize what they’re capable of. So this might be the sound of the Hotelier tearing the building down, but they’re working towards something monumental.
