A Day To Remember - Homesick
A Day To Remember
Homesick
Release Date: February 3rd, 2009
Label: Victory Records
Review by Jared Stossel
It’s become cliche to write music about “being on the road”. Now, there is a caveat to this; if your band is on the road for eleven months out of the year, seeing the same venues and locations day after day for months on end, it’s no surprise that the creativity well can run dry. You just have to make sure that the music is good enough to cut through the noise of every other band writing the same songs about heartbreak, long drives into early mornings, and frustration.
No band has done this better on A Day To Remember on Homesick. None. Taking every writing cliche in the pop-punk and metalcore handbook and turning into something exemplary beyond measure, the Ocala, Florida band had been making noise in the scene with the release of For Those Who Have Heart. It wasn’t a perfect record, but with songs like “The Plot To Bomb The Panhandle”, “Monument”, and “Heartless”, there was no doubt that there was something special about the band that could vacillate seamlessly between skatepark pop-punk and the heaviest of metal breakdowns.
Everything that seemed a little off-kilter on For Those Who Have Heart would be improved upon with the release of 2009’s Homesick, a twelve-track album that has a song for everything: love for your local music scene (“Holdin’ It Down For The Underground”), standing at the crossroads of a journey and not wanting to sell out (“The Downfall Of Us All) unbridled fury (“You Already Know What You Are”) and aching heartbreak (“If It Means A Lot To You”). It never once felt like the band were trying to write a song for the sake of cashing in on a genre trope; everything felt genuine amongst a sea of imitators.
The opening gang vocals on “The Downfall Of Us All” have practically become a wake-up call for even the dreariest of concert and festival crowds, inspiring legions of fans to scream the opening riff before the band blast through the speakers with one of the scene’s most iconic breakdowns. A Day To Remember bring their material into some of the poppiest of locales (the sugary sweetness of “NJ Legion Iced Tea”), along with a healthy portion of the heaviest material they’d ever done to date.Most bands in this genre were tuning their guitars from E down to drop C tuning, allowing for the heaviest riffs and biggest sound. “Mr. Highway’s Thinking About The End” found them tuning down even further to B, pushing the limits of what people knew they were capable of, and ushering in a truly diabolical breakdown; I’ve yet to see a crowd not absolutely lose their minds when vocalist Jeremy McKinnon screams “Disrespect your surroundings” like a man possessed.
Homesick found A Day To Remember pushing the limits of their, sometimes to the breaking point, and it has become their most iconic record for such a reason. There are bands that will put their heart on their sleeve, and then there are bands that will cut their chest open and place their heart in full view of anyone that will see. McKinnon is more vulnerable than ever before on Homesick, most evident in the final song, “If It Means A Lot To You”, an acoustic ballad that encourages droves of fans to scream “if you can wait ‘till I get home”. McKinnon wrote the song for his girlfriend at the time, struggling to figure out if they would remain together despite being on the road and pursuing his dream. The song begs the question: has the dream been right in front of me the whole time? Or is being on the road something that’s bigger than all of this? No one has the answers to something like this; it’s all learned through a lived experience. The song become a breakup anthem the world over since its release, with the female vocal part gorgeously delivered by VersaEmerge’s Sierra Kusterbeck.
The album was released at a time when bands were giving their songs ridiculously long names that made absolutely no sense to the lyrical content (see: “I’m Made of Wax, Larry, What Are You Made Of?”). While Homesick is a time capsule of sorts, harkening back to the days of neon-coated, skinny-jean-wearing, hair-straightening scene kids, it was a sign of what was to come for A Day To Remember in the later years. Despite lineup changes, albums that have worked (along with those that haven’t), Homesick remains a timeless entry not just in A Day To Remember’s catalog, but throughout the emo-pop punk-metalcore-whatever-you-want-to-call it music scene. It has stood the test of time, and it beautifully captures the feeling of isolation. You don’t have to be a touring band on the road to relate to it; everyone has felt like at least one of the songs on Homesick at some point in their life.
