Home Front: Light Sleeper

On the eve of the release of the new album Home Front, I’m publishing a long-overdue (and still unfinished — there’s plenty more that could be said about the song’s thematic weight, but I’m already too lazy) review of the first single.

The new single by the Canadian band Home Front – Light Sleeper.

You can’t step into the same river twice, but Home Front clearly really want to try. They want to make another track that would hit the same way Nation did — with singalong choruses, danceable synths, and an uplifting oi! beat. Does it sound like self-repetition? It kind of does.

Even the video released for the new song looks like that very video: it’s black and white, shot in a similar style, featuring the same people — and even the same guy who played a bouncer in Nation. Mike Marier now appears in the guise of Tim Cappello, Tina Turner’s saxophonist, shredding a sax solo and referencing a scene from the comedy horror film The Lost Boys.

There are plenty of references here in general. Just listen to the chorus, for example:

We're born alone
We die alone
Don't ever think you have to
Live alone

Doesn’t this sound like a slightly more gothic interpretation of “So remember out there somewhere you got a friend and you’ll never walk alone again”? A cover of Cock Sparrer has long been part of the band’s live set rotation.

At the end of the video, the band members walk in the guise of characters from the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.* According to Wikipedia:

the film gives the viewer the feeling of watching just one installment of a series, as if it were only a chapter from a book, encouraging expectations of a continuation or prompting the search for a beginning, since the film constantly references other characters, adventures, and events.

I don’t think there’s any deep meaning embedded in this reference — it’s more likely just a bit of fun. But from this angle, it no longer feels like self-repetition; instead, it comes across as a reference to themselves. A kind of intro to the new album that sounds like an outro from the previous one. At the same time, we’re left guessing what the final result will be: the two singles released afterward show that the band has no intention of stopping their experiments — they’ve already created a recognizable universe of visual and musical styles and can afford to do whatever they want while still remaining themselves.

And overall, the song is good — you should definitely give it a listen.

The new Home Front album Watch It Die is going out tomorrow, November 14.