Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
If you could imagine for a single moment what life would be like if you had already heard the finest album you ever likely to hear before you even turn to the hopeful and fruitful years that being a teenager can provide, then surely to keep searching for the ultimate musical experience would be considered an act of folly, a dangerous illusion to which the only thing to suffer is your bank balance and your sanity. Yet somehow despite all that you keep searching, you keep hoping something will appear out of the dark, a vital moment will present itself to you and make it all worthwhile.
It might not replace the finest album you own, the constant refrains going round your head for decades back and forth like a pendulum on a well oiled and cared for grandfather clock, but Blue October’s Home will find a way to make the second hand beat a little slower, it will force the well established lyrics going round your head to dissipate into thin air for a short while.
Home is where the heart not only lays but it has helped itself to the contents of the larder, emptied your tea caddy and resides upbeat tossing out all the tunes that you always knew were unworthy; it will wave to you as you see the anarchy and it will know full well that you will not mind one single iota. For in Home, the feeling of comfortable is necessary, it is blessed and verging on the hallowed and the songs that live within the heart beat of respectable and outrageous enjoyment live to thrill, they exist to capture the moment perfectly.
The Texas based band’s album is quite simply a joy from start to finish, near perfect, it only requires the brutal killing finish in which to make it complete and yet that does not bother the inner music lover at all. In songs such as Driver, We Know Where You Go, Break Ground, the awesome Leave It In The Dressing Room (Shake It Up) and Houston Heights, the album glories in the light and diminishes shade and darkness as if it were but a fly on the end of swatter.
You may spend all your life searching for that one great album, that one true masterpiece to take to the grave, Home is at least the pall bearer that will get you there with absolute love.
Ian D. Hall