Home Front
Watch It Die
La Vida Es Un Mus
Edmonton’s Home Front have steadily built a rep for big, melodic anthems and commanding live sets over the past four years, which’ll see them playing on the excellently curated Grauzone fest next year alongside the likes of Twin Tribes, Kontravoid, and Pixel Grip. But a quick skim of any of the twelve tracks on second full-length Watch It Die (or even just a minute of their live show) is all that’s needed to understand the contrast between Home Front and the vast majority of acts playing on darkwave stages these days. Home Front’s roots in hardcore and streetpunk, fused on Watch It Die with the sounds and principles of synthpop, make them one of the most bracing and refreshing acts in Canada right now.
It’s tempting to look at the elements which make up Home Front – core members Graeme MacKinnon and Clint Frazier’s extant CV’s, the moves they’ve made since forming during lockdown, and the looming influence of Blitz’s Second Empire Justice (an ur source shared by fellow Canadian travellers Spectres) – and frame Watch It Die as a post-punk record. And sure, tracks like “Empire” and “Eulogy” carry scuffed-up and sped-up versions of the magisterial portent of Echo and Tears For Fears’ most ambitious works, but that simple post-punk designation overlooks much of what makes the record shine.
Much of Watch It Die‘s immediate charm comes from the infusing of straightforward melodic punk with synthpop sounds, as on the peppy sweep of “Between The Waves”, replete with chirpy synth leads, and the buttressing of “New Madness”‘ bellicose chug with moody pads. It’s not just a formula of adding synths to punk or hardcore anthems that makes Home Front’s style work, though; the record’s often at its best when synthpop songwriting sits at the foundation of the tracks, as on the reflective “The Vanishing”, whose lyrics detail the choice between nostalgic indulgence in one’s elegantly wasted youth and turning the page, or in the Ultravox-esque shimmy that sits beneath the rock trappings of “Kiss The Sky”.
There’s still a good amount of pure punk in the record – from the violent, unreconstructed oi of “For The Children (Fuck All)” to a lyrical crib from Black Flag on “Young Offender”. Squint hard enough and you could find a link between Frazier’s past in dance punk assemblage Shout Out Out Out on the glitchy, paranoid pogo of “D.W.A.”. But no track better draws together all the different emotions, genres, and long hard looks in the mirror which Watch It Die brings to mind than “Light Sleeper”, a driving anthem whose beds of synth raise its righteous punk thunder into an existential arena, where finding camaraderie, self-respect, and love in the face of inevitable oblivion is made to feel like the only victory worth fighting for. Recommended.
