Florida s Home Is Where Surface with New Album The Whaler exclaim.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from exclaim.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Palm Coast, Florida Band To Watch Home Is Where have built up quite the following since releasing their debut I Became Birds in 2021, culminating in a tribute compilation put out earlier this year featuring reimaginings of its songs by fellow luminaries like Parannoul, Asian Glow, and awakebutstillinbed. Today, they’re announcing its follow-up, the whaler, which will be released in June. The band traveled out to Oakland and recorded the album with Jack Shirley at his Atomic Garden studio.
I Became Birds?
Brandon MacDonald: Around this time, spring of 2012. I had this idea for some kind of grand concept album after I heard In the
Aeroplane Over the Sea for the first time. I’m sure you have an idea of what that album does to a very confused and unhappy 16-year-old person… I have a few screws loose up in the old noggin, and I was in and out of mental hospitals around the time. I was having really vivid dreams about Edie Sedgwick visiting me in my dreams to give me guidance or something.
[The album] was about all the things that happened in those dreams. When I decided to write what would be the next record, I wanted to make a rock opera about Rolf from Ed, Edd n Eddy, like a fish out of water, somebody who’s there and wants to be there but also doesn’t feel like they belong.
5 March 2021
Ponder the moment when music gives you goosebumps. It’s amazing when some magical combination of voice and instrument and sound and lyric causes involuntary muscle contractions of hair follicles on the arms, along with a radiating release of tension in the chest that is usually only accessible through meditation or medication. It’s therapeutic in the most physical sense. This moment occurs on “Sewn Together from the Membrane of the Great Sea Cucumber”, the third track on Home Is Where’s
I Became Birds, a self-described fifth wave emo band from Palm Coast, Florida. It’s the moment when the so-called “puppy petter choir” comes in. “I want to pet every puppy I see,” the multi-gendered chorus of humans sings. It’s a moment of unabashed loveliness and warmth that masterfully softens up the listener for maximum impact when the band erupt into a minute-plus blistering Deafheaven-ly screamo assault before calmly receding into the melancholy chamber the s