Localized Music: Dear Landlord, Dream Homes
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It's amazing what location can mean to a punk band's sound. New York and California have plenty of tough-guy and party-guy bands, but the Midwest, with bands like Screeching Weasel, Naked Raygun, and Dillinger Four, has always given birth to punks who are just happy to be there, like Carbondale, Ill.-based Dear Landlord. Sonically, that means huge hooks, lyrics about hopelessness and drinking, and a tempo perfect for pogoing around like a moron. The band's latest, Dream Homes, captures that Midwestern sound perfectly.
After two highly addictive split 7-inches with Chinese Telephones and Off With Their Heads, Dream Homes' 14 songs come out to a neat 25 minutes—longer than the shorter records—and holds up to just as many repeated listens. It's clear the band's three vocalists spend plenty of time getting their patterns down: The lyrics never trample the music, and vice versa. Album-opener "I Live In Hell" (listen here) is either one voice at a time or all three at once with minimal interplay, a roughly minute-long attention grabber. Inversely, album-closer "A World That We Never Made" features more complex trade-off vocals and whoa-oh's in the background for good measure. Elsewhere, the traditional punk instrumentation of two guitars, bass, and drums offers little in the way of dynamics, chugging away from midtempo to fast.
Coasting roughly the sixth wave of pop-punk, Dear Landlord is finally getting it right and doing the Midwest proud. Grade: A
Here's Dear Landlord playing a collection of songs in Seattle:
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