ALBUM REVIEW: Home Front – Watch It Die (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Home Front are a DIY punk band formed in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 2020, and this is their follow-up to 2023’s debut full-length Games Of Power.
Graeme MacKinnon on vocals, guitars and bass and Clint Frazier on drums, synths, keyboards and programming play an intoxicating mix of punk, new wave, pop, indie and rock ‘n’ roll.
MacKinnon was previously in hardcore outfit No Problem and street-punk band Wednesday Night Heroes, while Frazier was in dance-punk/electro group Shout Out Out Out Out and The Franklins.
All those influences and more are brought to bear in this splendid album. I’ve seen them likened to early ’80s British band Blitz, when their early street-punk sound took an electronic turn, and that’s a fair comparison.
There are some bleak themes here, about loss of youth, planning your own death and how the world is going to shit, but despite that it’s a surprisingly uplifting album.
Things kick off with title track Watch It Die, and it picks up pace with the dystopian-sounding New Madness before lead single Light Sleeper gives us the first of several earworms. If this was Turnstile it would be all over the radio as MacKinnon sings “We’re born alone, we die alone/Don’t ever think you have to, live alone.”
Latest single Between The Waves is a real feelgood song, about finding your own place in life, while Eulogy is quite the opposite, wishing for death: “If I knew when I’d die/At least then I could plan my life.”
The Vanishing, powered by a motoric beat, contrasts carefree youth with the responsibilities of adulthood, and bemoans how time slips away from us all.
I’ve seen Home Front labelled prairie punk, and one of the album’s standout tracks is For The Children (F*ck All), which is a blaze of guitars and synths and echoes, with its refrain of “Fuck all is all that’s left for us” coming over like an electro version of Sham 69’s What Have We Got?
Kiss The Sky, about trying to fulfill your dreams, ‘borrows’ the synth line from Harold Faltermeyer’s 1980s hit Axel F, and could be classic Depeche Mode as MacKinnon sings: “And if I died a million times/At least I tried/To kiss the sky.”
Always This Way is a glam-rock stomp with a punky vocal, asking “While we kick rocks/They launch rockets to space/And you ask yourself/Why is it always this way?”
Paranoia, about always being watched, feeds Dancing With Anxiety, and there’s another angry anthem in Young Offender, which warns: “They hate us, we hate them/We’re living in dangerous times” before the album on a real melancholic note with epic closer Empire.
“For us, ultimately, this is music that comes out of loss and heartbreak and failure,” says MacKinnon, “but I hope people have a good time listening to us.” I certainly did, and I recommend that you do too. 8/10.
