Throughout 2020, punk bands and fans wondered how anyone could generate and sustain a wave of excitement without the usual dues-paying opening slots, five-band gigs or breakout Fest sets. The brash Floridians in Home Is Where might still do that eventually, but they’ve excelled in the compact spaces that serve as proving grounds in 2021: TikTok, Twitter, and 18-minute albums. On their bracing first official LP I Became Birds, Home Is Where talk a big game—about power structures, trans rights, and especially about fifth-wave emo. Brandon MacDonald mostly expresses themselves in uncanny bursts of imagery, so the few times they are direct are rare enough to quote in full: “cops are flammable, if you try,” “Look at all the dogs/I wanna pet every puppy I see,” “How long has it been since a president got assassinated?” (mind you, “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays” was initially released in October 2020). These lines don’t represent contradictory impulses so much as poles on a moral continuum, a coherent worldview of good and evil that lends I Became Birds the heft of a manifesto despite the length of an EP.
I Became Birds is often simple enough to be performed as folk or punk, but please don’t call it “folk-punk.” “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays” repeats a two-bar melody over a single teeth-clenched riff, its urgency modulated by MacDonald’s howls about being immersed in an ocean of splinters and a “uniform of gasoline.” “Assisted Harakiri” achieves perpetual motion despite repeating the same two chords at the same speed; during its four and a half minutes, a simple lead octave fissions into a flurry of tapped notes, MacDonald’s lysergic lyrics visions escalated by a runner’s high. With its strings, its so-called “puppy petter choir” (ID’ed as such in the credits) and mid-song screamo break, “Sewn Together From the Membrane of the Great Sea Cucumber” is an outlier, and also the album’s centerpiece. It’s the most immediately impressive thing on I Became Birds, perhaps because it’s the only song that immediately recalls the most ambitious revival-era bands.
A list of consecutive Bandcamp tags on their 2019 debut our mouths to smile reads “bob dylan worship” and “emo,” and they mean it—witness their @bobdylansmells Twitter handle and our mouths to smile’s “Dob Bylan,” where he’s MacDonald’s best friend, leader, savior, dealer, comrade, mom and dad. MacDonald sees Dylan as part of a lineage that includes more traditional emo influences like Tim Kinsella and Jeff Mangum—singers with unconventional voices and a surrealist take on the way our bodies have minds of their own. “Oh! The treachery of anatomy,” MacDonald screams on “Assisted Harakiri.” Though MacDonald favors language as much for its phonic impact as its literal meaning, they never equivocate. MacDonald renders history, memory and the sweltering atmosphere of Palm Coast, Florida with tactile, ripe imagery (“Preservative sun showers trickle down,” “Sunday school in a bug spray June”). But they convey the most meaning through their unhinged delivery— when they yell “hey Samantha!” throughout “Long Distance Conjoined Twins,” it carries the same ecclesiastical fervor as “I love you Jesus Christ!”
No matter how abstract MacDonald gets with their imagery, the title of I Became Birds is the decoder key—they’ve described the album as the retelling of their gender transition and, perhaps not coincidentally, it evokes ANOHNI’s I Am a Bird Now, which explored similar themes of heartache and deliverance in a completely different style of music. “Let’s trespass vacant properties we claim are our bodies,” MacDonald howls, comparing their heart to an unused power grid waiting to be activated; a fitting image for a song that makes honking harmonica over acoustic guitars still sound like the most electrifying music of 2021. Even if they’ve bristled at comparisons to Joyce Manor or the Hotelier, this is who I hear when I listen to I Became Birds. It’s not because Home Is Where sound much like them; it’s because they channel the same sense of boundless possibility, of horizons expanding in real time. With Home Is Where, it’s all about feel, and I Became Birds feels like emo once again flipping the switch on its eternal energy source.
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