The Hotelier - Home, Like Noplace Is There (Album Review)
Friday, 21 February 2014
Written by Huw Baines
With ‘Home, Like Noplace Is There’, the Hotelier have hit the post-hardcore mother lode, turning in a record that is both emotionally resonant and truly anthemic.
Having recently traded in their former name, the Hotel Year, the Massachusetts group have also added grit and depth to the open pop-punk sound of their 2011 collection ‘It Never Goes Out’, with Christian Holden displaying a rare ability to knit deeply personal lyrics with powerful melodies.
Holden is poetic in his phrasing and his words form missives from near collapse, seemingly ringed by a thousand outward concerns that bear down more and more with each moment.
Amid a thrilling tangle of guitars on The Scope Of All Of This Rebuilding, he laments: “You cut our ropes, left the umbilical, and now I carry around this weight of broken hope. I can’t retrace, and I lost my hold and blame myself because that is all I’ve ever known.”
Throughout, the Hotelier - completed by Sam Frederick, Cody Millet and Chris Hoffman - display a new-found knack for dynamic shifts in pace and tone, with the warm opening guitar licks of Among The Wallflowers contrasting beautifully with the desperate chorus: “ If you break when I break, will you carry me away?”
When things speed up just a little, they neatly re-cast themselves as a ragged punk outfit, on the superb In Framing, and throat-stripping hardcore band, on Life In Drag. Far from repeating its best moves, ‘Home, Like Noplace Is There’ neatly pools disparate elements into a tenacious whole.
Like the Menzingers’ ‘On The Impossible Past’, this record has the potential to lift the Hotelier beyond their current station without sacrificing any of the elements that make the band such a powerful proposition. Expect to hear these words rebounding off sweat-soaked walls near you soon.
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