Home Alone – There’s A Light Coming Through (Beko) CD

Product Description

There are many times throughout There’s A Light Coming Through, the new record from Toronto’s Home Alone, when you’ll find yourself wondering whether the album title is a simple statement or an optimistic hope. There are occasional moments, when the record is as its most limber, when it appears to be leaning towards the former; a chink of daylight in the distance, a clear and visible light at the end of the tunnel. It never seems to last though – as the delicate ‘Basement’ brings the album to a subdued close you’re left only with the over-riding feeling that the light coming through is still as far away now as it was at the start.

Fortunately, for us rather than him, that darkening place of despondency, which often reveals itself in the early hours of the morning, often produces a compelling soundtrack, and that proves to be the case here. Loneliness and longing seeps out of the majority of the tracks  and it sucks you in completely. In albums such as this we often look for moments of light to alleviate this kind of pressure, to give us some respite from the sound of someone else struggling, but it never really comes. And we never really need it, either. The tracks often appear weightless, suspended in the ether, not desperately climbing to the surface but not sinking to the bottom either. It’s happy to be suspended, to suspend itself, to offer a prolonged snapshot of being lost in a world it knows only too well. Drive All Night is a perfect example of this, the same three chords repeated over and over and over until you’re no longer sure where you are or where you were even trying to drive to in the first place. It’s vague and indefinite but it’s beautiful too and we take comfort in that rather than worry about anything more specific.

Perhaps the biggest key to the records closely guarded grasp lies in Blunts; a track that first appeared in 2013 and sits at the centre of There’s A Light. There are many nods to weed, and the effect of it, throughout Home Alone’s back catalogue and once you consider this, the picture, somewhat ironically, becomes a lot clearer. That separation between our thoughts and the harsh realities of the real world swamps this record cloaking everything in a fog that’s present throughout, but it’s not one that muddies or confuses matters, it’s one that we find relief in. Revel in, even. A place to hide ourselves away, where we can be anything and anyone for a couple of hours, and one where the daylight that’s beginning to creep in through the eyelids isn’t the cold world calling us back but, simply, a light coming through. – Gold Flake Paint Blog

Tracklist: interstates & stuff / restless / touch the ground / drive all night / beds / blunts / broke the ice / basements

Beko  b213