Around the time Florida emo quartet Home Is Where released their debut LP i became birds in 2021, it became nearly impossible to read about daily COVID death tolls without coming across comparisons to 9/11. The shorthand was obvious: how do people become so numb to mass death that they shrug it off daily in a pandemic while memorializing the deaths on 9/11 for decades? That question also extends to any crisis where many look the other way, whether it’s the increasing creep of environmental decay, the endangerment and extinction of animals crucial to the global ecosystem or the tacit attempts at genocide of trans individuals for simply trying to live their lives. The longer these threats persist, the more destruction becomes second nature, so prevalent that, for some, it becomes background noise.
Frontwoman Brandon MacDonald turns this constant peril into anything but an afterthought with a repeated scream: “everyday feels like 9/11.” The cry pierces the midpoint of the whaler, Home Is Where’s ambitiously self-proclaimed “concept record about getting used to things getting worse,” but MacDonald’s performance argues that adjustment doesn’t equal complacency. It rattles the relative quiet surrounding either side of “everyday feels like 9/11,” like a moment of sudden lucidity about all the bullshit endured before the first wail erupts.
This is where the whaler thrives: feeding off of the same ceaselessly roiling possibility that made i became birds more than just another fifth wave emo debut. That LP managed to pack something new into each track in its lithe 18 minute runtime; the band’s sophomore record pushes even further, the scope of its sound never feeling confined. On the whaler, Home Is Where can be post-hardcore maniacs on “everyday feels like 9/11,” before quickly switching gears to the alt-country pedal steel of “daytona 500.” But it’s MacDonald’s commanding howls and yelps, alongside her jagged lyricism, that anchor each maneuver, complemented by guitarist Tilley Komorny’s fluid shifts in accentuating every disparate narrative.
The most obvious point of comparison is Neutral Milk Hotel, an analogue the band frequently invoked themselves. The most blatant parallels all but invite themselves—the ways electricity flows through MacDonald’s idiosyncratic vocal performances like Jeff Mangum’s, how 9/11 is to the whaler as Anne Frank was to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, the addition of a singing saw to the band’s instrumental palette—but Home Is Where derives just as much impact in the visceral, often uncomfortable imagery that Mangum had a knack for finding unexpected beauty in. Echoes of the repression and the search for some deeper place of cosmic belonging linger in the sexual disillusionment of “yes! yes! a thousand times yes!” or the imagined elder years of “nursing home riot.”
Like the best moments on any Neutral Milk Hotel album—or, frankly, any emo album worth a damn—the whaler excels when it feels like Home Is Where are at its slipperiest as a band, conjuring something capable of breaking beyond a simple genre signifier. The record’s opening run is its strongest showcase of this: “skin meadow” acts as a continuation of the power chord-heavy roar that made i became birds an instant cult favorite, morphing its abstract title into an unexpectedly bracing singalong. Things take a turn for the downcast on “lily pad pupils,” with a languid combination of banjo and pedal steel gradually boiling over into MacDonald’s gnarled screams. In its patience and command of dynamics, it might be Home Is Where’s best track to date, condensing their unpredictable appeal into a miniature cataclysm. As if refusing to stay in one place too long, “yes! yes! a thousand times yes!” flips the mood once again, its buoyant emo riff on “Soak Up The Sun” dissolving as MacDonald’s narrative grows colder and loveless. The album never quite hits this sequencing high again—a relatively muted ending trio feels overshadowed by showier early tracks—but this opening stretch is an exceptional demonstration of Home Is Where’s virtuosic flexibility.
Conceptually, the record feels just as expansive. The act of whaling becomes a recurring throughline across several tracks, a figurative stand-in for rooting through any kind of ugly, tiresome business long enough for the strain of it to sink in. On “skin meadow,” MacDonald offers a restless prayer with sneering sarcasm: “forgive me for giving a shit.” Coming just after she sings about “spilling [her] guts to the gutless,” this moment becomes both a plea and a kissoff to a world that would sooner push remorse to the side than stop the machinery of the world from churning.
This reflection on a need for empathy, even as things grow worse, takes on another layer with MacDonald and Komorny being trans women. Home is Where have spent a significant portion of the record’s promotion speaking out on the new draconian laws against trans people in their home state of Florida, legislation that directly threatens their own lives. In this lens, it becomes easy to reroute much of the songwriting on enduring daily violence and weariness from a trans perspective, one constantly facing new attacks on its existence. While i became birds was more openly telegraphed as an album about transness, much of the whaler still carries that thread subtextually; its often raw lyricism about organs and “useless genitalia” becomes a glimpse into how the world’s hostile views of transness can seep into the way we see our own bodies. Persistence, here, is not without its fair share of collateral damage.
Which brings it all back to “everyday feels like 9/11”—just after Home Is Where have torn the place down, the band slowly creeps into the interstitial “9/12,” three spare piano notes circling the previous track’s melody. Where MacDonald’s writing on “everyday feels like 9/11” alternates between a nauseous ouroboros and an urgent panic attack, its successor is made of only a few words: “and on / september 12th / 2001 / everyone / went back to work.” In a lesser songwriter’s hands, this brief reflection could be trite—a pithy statement on how life will always keep moving on. But the understatement of the track—MacDonald’s voice never rising above a whisper, Komorny’s delicate finger-picked guitar— nests conflicting undertones of the withdrawal, apathy and perseverance that can be read in these lyrics.
Not even the whaler’s ending can escape its tangled outlook. MacDonald sings of “[outgrowing] these innards” in the bloody, repetitive work of whaling on album closer “floral organs,” only for a broken tape loop to feed back into the opening of “skin meadow,” like an infinite cycle. Here, there always seems to be viscera and bile still left to deal with. The gory work of enduring is never done, but a new day is another chance to stop the entrails from spilling for good.
Natalie Marlin is a freelance music and film writer based in Minneapolis with writing in Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, Pitchfork and Little White Lies. She was previously as a staff writer at Allston Pudding. She is always at the front of the pit. Follow her on Twitter at @NataliesNotInIt.
