{"id":172228,"date":"2025-06-10T06:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T06:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/172228\/"},"modified":"2025-06-10T06:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T06:12:10","slug":"home-is-where-hunting-season-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/172228\/","title":{"rendered":"Home Is Where: Hunting Season Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Home Is Where fancy themselves as practitioners of the wry, writerly Southern thing, though they avoid the tastefulness that\u2019s usually part of the outfit\u2014MacDonald narrates as someone more likely to be in an episode of Jackass or Cops than someone watching it on TV. On \u201cArtificial Grass,\u201d Tilley Komorny plays an inventive, subtly virtuosic take on the standard smothered-and-chunked chords and leads of Southern rock while drums churn and MacDonald surveys the lonesome, abandoned Southeast like Isaac Brock<\/a> gone Florida Woman. But then, Hunting Season settles into a default mode, with a 13-minute stretch of nearly identical tempo and rhythm. \u201cBlack Metal Mormon,\u201d \u201cStand Up Special,\u201d and \u201cBike Week\u201d all make for vivid images of Dixie decay on their own, but coming directly after \u201cArtificial Grass,\u201d they stunt the momentum on an album that boasts a run time nearly thrice as long as the band\u2019s debut.<\/p>\n

Hunting Season\u2019s velocity ironically picks right back up with the band\u2019s slowest song to date. \u201cThere\u2019s more roads than places to go now,\u201d MacDonald sighs on \u201cEveryone Won the Lotto,\u201d casting an eye on company towns that set up shop in the South, bringing steady work and little else. Using \u201clotto\u201d instead of \u201clottery\u201d is a keen choice, setting the stakes appropriately smaller and sadder, an amount of money that only results in a temporary fix. From there on out, every song earns Home Is Where a new superlative: their prettiest song yet (\u201cShenandoah\u201d), the one that sounds best at a honky tonk (\u201cMechanical Bull\u201d), and a Southern rock mini-opera that could win over a trucker bar (\u201cMilk & Diesel\u201d). \u201cRoll Tide\u201d is simply the most Home Is Where have ever been, a 10-minute noise odyssey that whoops and yawps like Animal Collective<\/a> if someone snuck moonshine into Campfire Songs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It all ends up with a love song to each other; why it\u2019s called \u201cDrive-By Mooning\u201d is anyone\u2019s guess, and ending with a gang vocal reading of their band motto (\u201chome is where forever\u201d) shows that their emo roots are strong and deep<\/a>. But Hunting Season also reads like a love letter to a place that refused to love them back. Both MacDonald and Komorny finally fled Florida, fearing the state\u2019s increasingly vile legislation against trans people such as themselves. The band also debuted many of these songs live while headlining the Liberation Weekend<\/a> festival in Washington, D.C., organized in response to anti-trans legislation throughout the country. Alt-country isn\u2019t just a genre for Home is Where\u2014Hunting Season longs for an actual alternate country, where everything weird and wild and wonderful about their home is finally safeguarded and celebrated.<\/p>\n

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Home Is Where: Hunting Season<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Home Is Where fancy themselves as practitioners of the wry, writerly Southern thing, though they avoid the tastefulness…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[31104,77,269,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-172228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114657594274045831","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}