Home Is Where fancy themselves as practitioners of the wry, writerly Southern thing, though they avoid the tastefulness that’s usually part of the outfit—MacDonald narrates as someone more likely to be in an episode of Jackass or Cops than someone watching it on TV. On “Artificial Grass,” Tilley Komorny plays an inventive, subtly virtuosic take on the standard smothered-and-chunked chords and leads of Southern rock while drums churn and MacDonald surveys the lonesome, abandoned Southeast like Isaac Brock gone Florida Woman. But then, Hunting Season settles into a default mode, with a 13-minute stretch of nearly identical tempo and rhythm. “Black Metal Mormon,” “Stand Up Special,” and “Bike Week” all make for vivid images of Dixie decay on their own, but coming directly after “Artificial Grass,” they stunt the momentum on an album that boasts a run time nearly thrice as long as the band’s debut.
Hunting Season’s velocity ironically picks right back up with the band’s slowest song to date. “There’s more roads than places to go now,” MacDonald sighs on “Everyone Won the Lotto,” casting an eye on company towns that set up shop in the South, bringing steady work and little else. Using “lotto” instead of “lottery” is a keen choice, setting the stakes appropriately smaller and sadder, an amount of money that only results in a temporary fix. From there on out, every song earns Home Is Where a new superlative: their prettiest song yet (“Shenandoah”), the one that sounds best at a honky tonk (“Mechanical Bull”), and a Southern rock mini-opera that could win over a trucker bar (“Milk & Diesel”). “Roll Tide” is simply the most Home Is Where have ever been, a 10-minute noise odyssey that whoops and yawps like Animal Collective if someone snuck moonshine into Campfire Songs.
It all ends up with a love song to each other; why it’s called “Drive-By Mooning” is anyone’s guess, and ending with a gang vocal reading of their band motto (“home is where forever”) shows that their emo roots are strong and deep. But Hunting Season also reads like a love letter to a place that refused to love them back. Both MacDonald and Komorny finally fled Florida, fearing the state’s increasingly vile legislation against trans people such as themselves. The band also debuted many of these songs live while headlining the Liberation Weekend festival in Washington, D.C., organized in response to anti-trans legislation throughout the country. Alt-country isn’t just a genre for Home is Where—Hunting Season longs for an actual alternate country, where everything weird and wild and wonderful about their home is finally safeguarded and celebrated.
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