Home Front floods their debut full-length, Games of Power, with hard-hitting and infectiously catchy post-punk anthems.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my musical obsessions of the past. These reminiscences are mostly triggered by music being made now, like Games of Power, the debut full-length from Edmonton duo Home Front. Produced by Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco, Games of Power is a post-punk juggernaut of a record that’s a tossed salad of genres and sounds. Is it a screamo-industrial goth album? Sometimes (see “Nation”). Is it barbed hard rock embedded in melodic synthpop? Ok, go with that. Is it brooding new wave as interpreted by guitar-playing metalheads? Sure, if you’re okay with being somewhat reductive.
Usually, music as schizophrenic as Games of Power leaves me feeling unsatisfied. Still, Home Front is so adept and deft at forging hard-hitting and infectiously catchy post-punk anthems that I keep returning to its melodic twists and jagged riffs. The duo’s pedigree precedes them: Graeme MacKinnon cut his teeth with punk as part of No Problem and the Wednesday Night Heroes, while Clint Frazier and his cohorts in Shout Out Out Out Out temporarily made Edmonton ground zero for the dance-punk revolution of the early aughts. Together, MacKinnon and Frazier flood Home Front’s sound with touchstones from their previous projects and what I imagine are their earliest musical influences.
The opening track, “Faded State,” signals Games of Power’s tone and mood with dissonant industrial grinding and ominous distorted synth swells. Motorik beats and rhythms bring the muscle as the song blooms into a melodic 80s-era new wave anthem. I get similar chill bumps from “Overtime,” a song that feels like it’s being pulled directly out of a late-night episode of City Limits. As nostalgic as all that sounds, what Home Front intuitively understands is just how timelessly modern and contemporary they sound. It’s why “Contact” can take cues from a 40-year-old classics like “Blue Monday” and “I Ran” and still feel current and relevant.
Lyrically, there is a cringe-inducing cartoonishness to “Born Killer” and “New Face of Death” that I’d happily sacrifice in the running order if it meant more time for meaty and soaring moments like the epic closing track, “Quiet World.” That said, Games of Power leans into commenting on the current state of affairs with just the right amount of vitriol and venom to balance out its animated alt-pop assault. Right off the top, Home Front asserts that “Nobody here gets out alive” (perhaps paraphrasing a lyric from the Doors’ “Five to One,” which was later used by Sugerman and Hopkins as the title of their classic Jim Morrison biography?). While it is theoretically true that nothing we do is going to keep us from dying someday, with Games of Power, Home Front asserts that any life worth living is worth the fight against all the games of power, corruption, and lies (“we tell ourselves”) that our modern world throws our way.
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