Home - So Much Love

(Cooking Vinyl, 2000)

As was hinted on their earlier, messier releases, Home always had it in ’em to make a lush, complex, song-based record, but I reckon that on those screwy albs of days-gone-by there musta been the constant twin frustrations of CASH and EQUIPMENT (rather than SKILL and AMBITION) holding the band back from achieving true mega-pop grandeur. Once the group finally managed to hook up with Lips/Rev biggie Dave Fridmann, though, poop hit the fan in the most glorious of ways. The expansive Home XIV, front to back, demonstrates this quite ably, with single “So Much Love” (released as a 7” limited to 250 copies) providing the purest radio-pop thrills. It’s a bouncy, optimistic number that wins thanks to sunny harmonies, some dollops of “What Goes On”-style organ and those close-mic’d drums that are Fridmann’s production trademark. Fragmentary weirdness is not totally gone, however, as the B-side is another variation on the “Children’s Suite” piece that the band had already worked into three full-lengths. This chop-’em-up instrumental puts an ominous, horror-movie-esque spin on XIV’s “Children’s Suite 3: Displaying Prisms,” then segues into a robotic, electronics-driven section similar to XI’s “Children’s Suite 2: Health,” before concluding with a cinematic crescendo. Whew!