Blue October
"Home" Album Review
First, an analogy:
Imagine yourself as a piece of
coal...in a cold, dark pit of despair, encrusted and trapped inside a
hard, black shell. Yet there's this tiny glimmer deep inside of you
saying there has got to be more to life than this. So you start
slowly chipping away while deep inside that shell. Self- pity,
self-loathing and self-harm make you realize you don't want to live
your entire life this way. Each step, each piece you chip away brings
you closer to the surface, closer to the air until finally smashing
all the way through and you can finally breathe and feel the sunlight
on your face. It took that darkness, that feeling of being trapped in
a dark place to make something almost equally indestructible yet
brilliant in its beauty, something that can be polished and
multifaceted...to look at it takes your breath away and still has a
fire deep inside it saying it will never go back to being coal.
There's always that memory in the back
of your mind of the dark places you've been. As you get older and
evolve you never really forget and you carry a fragment of that coal
and learn from it. It's that little reminder that drives you forward.
You know you can't stay there in that dark place but it's what
precipitated your ability to evolve and makes you grateful for it.
Music is emotion. It stirs something
deep within us. It reaches us in a way that mere words can't. It's
akin to actions speaking louder than words yet the lyrics speak to us
as well. There's only so many letters in the alphabet, only so many
words in language. As well there are only so many musical notes, only
so many chords you can play but there's magic in taking sounds and
words and putting them together in such a way to evoke emotion and
reach into our minds and drives us to take action, whatever that may
be...to break down, to build up, to get out of a bad situation into
something better.
Blue October's music is as complex as
we are as human beings. You can have a softer side but still have
that dirty, gritty, moody side as well. Their new album “Home”
has a mixture of all these things. There is a flavour for whatever
your taste. Some flavours may not appeal to you at first...it's a bit
different from how it tasted before...it may be a taste you acquire over time. It may take one listen or maybe several to reach you but each time you
really listen, you find something you didn't hear before.
“Home” just like all Blue October's
albums has variety, depth and substance...something you can truly
sink your teeth into. Most pop music is all fluff and superficial,
repetitive nothingness. I gave up on radio, music award shows and
“popular” music because of that. Blue October will never be pop
music in that sense.
Music is subjective and I fight the
urge to pick apart each song because that's just what I do with
lyrics. It's not up to me to interpret each song's meaning. It's up
to you how it affects you. Personally, this album is just as
brilliant if not more so as all of Blue October's previous albums, it's just
speaking from a different, evolved perspective. My analogy at the
beginning kind of encapsulates what this album evoked within my mind.
I went from smiling to crying to making that stank face that
musicians make to dancing around like a free spirit. After over 20
years, shine bright with the brilliance of a diamond, Blue October!
