Preceding nearly every line on Foremost & Fair is a gasp. On the opener, "Seven Thirty", Home Blitz frontman Daniel DiMaggio erratically sucks air in before he pushes any out. Those spasms anticipate the album’s pace: Foremost & Fair is a spritely, frantic power-pop record, and when it does lose momentum, it’s an act of willful, jarring derailment. Which is fantastic, since DiMaggio knows the mechanisms of a song intimately enough to enact swift sabotage and leave a gorgeous wreck.
While other recent power-pop records have owed a debt to tuneful punks like the Buzzcocks, Home Blitz is more evocative of power-pop’s nonstarters: the now-marketable misfortunes of Big Star and Rockin' Horse and the skinny-tie flops who disappointed label execs in the wake of "My Sharona". It’s a good time to be into that stuff. Labels like Sing Sing Records have redeemed scores of bands once snubbed by market forces or their own immutable peculiarities. Foremost & Fair brings the latter camp to mind, except Home Blitz sounds simply committed to its left-field flourishes. Sure, nowadays the genre has relatively little commercial potential to squander, but DiMaggio flaunts his oblique streak like a point of pride, or protest. It’s what compels repeated listening.
To begin, there’s his voice: Breathy like Brett Smiley or Milk ‘n Cookies’ Ian North, unapologetically affected like Game Theory’s late Scott Miller, and often a bit pitchy. DiMaggio spikes saccharine melodies with bratty little gestures, rebelling against his own compositional knowhow. Also, the vocals rest decidedly on top of a mix that’s saturated with shimmery tones: teeming harpsichord, zippy keyboard, sunburst acoustic guitar picking. There’s little low-end to temper all of that, which amounts to an almost unrelentingly bright listen and underscores the album’s insistent urgency. The very first line goes, "Seven-thirty headed towards seven forty-five." The 37-minute record scrambles to fit into that 15-minute window.
Foremost & Fair’s A side is a salvo of impeccable songs. "I'm That Key", sequenced second, surges with radiant vocal hooks, careens through a solo, and stumbles into a busted outro. On "The Tide", DiMaggio cheekily narrates romance and seaside whimsy, while "A in E" is reminiscent of approximately eight swaggering Big Star tracks. "Downtown" is the album’s punchiest song, where a clipped riff trades jabs with the trap kit before it collapses into an arrhythmic bridge and then regains velocity.
The longest song, at almost five minutes, is "The Hall", where chintzy snare and clinking metal keep a glacial pace as sharp keys and guitar ring out beneath DiMaggio’s bleating. It’s an audacious centerpiece, like grandiose glam balladry running a glitter deficit, and a signal that DiMaggio isn’t content to dish sugary ditties, which "Why It Cries" almost immediately reinforces—without the same listening pleasure.
"Why It Cries" is longer than "The Hall", but it can’t exactly be called a song. For over five minutes, it sounds like someone is looking for something in a cluttered music studio, appended by an impromptu Celtic jam. Since DiMaggio’s songs tend to implode in one way or another, "Why It Cries" seems like the autodestruct function planted at the core of Foremost & Fair as a whole. Or maybe it’s an elaborate set-up for a cruel joke: Slog through the tedium and meet "Sick and Crazy", an exultant song that’s punishingly short at a mere 44 seconds.
DiMaggio, who has helmed Home Blitz for about 10 years, has issued scores of format, label, and genre-ambivalent recordings. Considering all of that, the initial panting on "Seven Thirty" is less like anticipation of the upcoming sprint and more like reeling from an earlier marathon. In hindsight, that bit of sputtering will also emerge as a clarion call for the whole of Foremost & Fair: DiMaggio foregrounds eccentricities, which only outlines the strength of his conventional songwriting in relief.
