The Hotelier Release Essential Punk Record

Occasionally, I fall in love with an album because of the way it resonates with the music I grew up listening to. Maybe it reminds me of when I was younger and knew not a single thing about what I wanted to someday become and how punk music had a fundamental impact on my changing perspective and maturation.

But it’s been forever since I’ve heard a record that reminds me that I’m still growing up. The Massachusetts punk band The Hotelier, formerly known as The Hotel Year, has created that kind of record.

Home, Like Noplace Is There is a heavy, heartbreaking masterwork. It’s everything emotional punk bands should strive to create in this day and age. From the album’s opening cut, the tense, slow-build “An Introduction To The Album,” The Hotelier’s near-romantic retelling of tragedy and loss in the face of an uncertain future just becomes more and more pronounced and affective; so much so that the final acoustic outro of “Dendron” is a plea for the listener to dive back in and further examine and extract meaning from Home’s nine tracks.

As much as this first track lays down the groundwork for an amazing punk album, it serves mostly as a promise from The Hotelier to the listener. “An Introduction To The Album” pulls back the curtains on the damaged and imperfect set upon which the album takes place and acquaints its audience with its likewise flawed and struggling characters. By the track’s end, these characters are already unraveling, and their true problems and difficulties in their world are revealed and lamented by Christian Holden’s imperfect, yet expressive voice: “And the pills that you gave didn’t do anything/I just slept for years on end.” The track foreshadows the album’s scope as a whole, building from a quieter piano line into a larger pop-punk ballad before finally exploding into a pummeling punk downpour.

Home, Like Noplace Is There keeps and exceeds the promise made by its opening track and The Hotelier consistently one-ups itself with each passing number. “The Scope of All of This Rebuilding” is a more straightforward pop-punk song, catchy and engaging enough to perk the ears of any listener not yet enthralled. This second track deals with the often-romanticized right of passage—leaving home. These characters grapple with the task of making their own worthwhile lives outside of their former homes and appear to be just minutes away from throwing in the towel already: “You cut our ropes/Left the umbilical/And now I carry around/This weight of broken hope.”

Further down the line, “Your Deep Rest” reveals itself to be the most up-front of the album’s nine tracks, as the narrator deals with the suicide of a close friend. The song appears to be upbeat at its outset, but this musical tone is counterbalanced by the clear subject of focus: “I called in sick from your funeral/The sight of your body made me feel uncomfortable.” This song highlights one of the more important aspects of Home, Like Noplace Is There. The album, if it’s listened to carefully, is unsettling to sit through. It creates an intense and near-involuntary emotional response. At two or three points during “Your Deep Rest” alone, as the music gets a little quieter and Holden’s voice a little bit clearer, the reality of these stories becomes overwhelming.

This is what sets The Hotelier apart from other bands of its kind, this sense of rawness in nearly every aspect of its work. More than that, though, Home is important because it addresses topics often avoided or glossed over in today’s musical scene. The chaotic, heavy “Life In Drag” pays direct attention to issues of gender identity and how our society harmfully deals with it; “Among The Wildflowers” tells a story of mental disease and self-image in the context of family history; “Housebroken” questions true freedom. These are weighty topics presented in an extremely personal light, and they are often grounded by hints of easily relatable generalities and details: “I searched for a way out/Don’t we all?”

All of these vignettes are unified in the finality of “Dendron,” which rises and falls in waves of brash and enveloping rock arrangements, just as Holden’s vocal performance admits varying levels of emphasis, lending special poignancy to a line as simple as “man, I’m sorry every day.” Home, Like Noplace Is There ends in an apologetic and shivering reflection of friends lost, homes broken and societies fundamentally damaging—at last delivering the final, and possibly most emotional and cathartic lines, of The Hotelier’s grand performance: “Engraved in the stone/By request and recurse of friends dead is/’Tell me again that it’s all in my head.’”

 Home, Like Noplace Is There, if the world is a just place, will make waves. This is the kind of album that makes young music-lovers pick up a guitar or a microphone, the kind of album that turns a casual listener into a lifelong fan. Home reflects the lowest, most hopeless points in the lives of young adults—but it leaves the possibility of change and growth wide open. The Hotelier have set the bar for 2014, not only for punk music or music in general, but for everyone on a personal level. And I think that’s the highest compliment a record can get from me.

Critic’s Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Jordan Walsh can be reached at jordan.walsh@theminaretonline.com