The recording project of London-based musician, Charlotte Valentine, No Home re-imagines the possibilities of punk. Taking the wry, socially aware confidence of Priests and coupling it with the abrasive noise that you might expect to find on a release on The Flenser, there’s barely a guitar on latest record, Fucking Hell. But in place of power chords, No Home gives us droning soundscapes, harsh keyboard noise, sluggish beats with an unnerving cadence; a visceral sound that attempts to sequester chaos with some sense of order, and sometimes lets the chaos win.
Opener ‘Burning the Body’ sets the tone, its instrumentation barely there beyond the ominous patter of drums and pervasive background drone. The near-silence stretches for an uncomfortable period, threatening to catch alight but never realising the potential, before a keyboard enters with an organ’s heft. This brings with it No Home’s vocals too, a committed outpouring of whispers and wails that blurs the line between empowered and inconsolable. The track is haunted by an electronic glitch too, a sporadic malfunction, like the appearance of an old and violent force sitting in some plane below ours that nevertheless manages to push through.
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There’s an almost acapella feel to some of the songs, the instrumentation of tracks such as ‘A B- In This Economy’ more like a mood made manifest, needling and anxious, foreshadowing some future break. Others, such as ‘Catholic School Never Taught Me How To Talk To Men’, are far more spacious, but even the ethereal sound is interrupted by abrasive noise and then a demented pounding beat.
The track captures something of No Home’s music. The sense that something, some thing, is hammering upon the door, demanding to be let in. What it might be is unclear, but it is large and likely violent, and its never clear if the songs are attempting to keep this thing at bay or fighting the urge to submit to its potential for spectacle and change.
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“I’m an exile in the city, I’m an exile in the country,” Valentine sings on ‘Exile’. “It’s all a lie.” The track grounds the No Home moniker, caught between here and there with no possibility of solving the conflict, instead owning the no man’s land in between. ‘4×4’ might be the most classically punk song on the record, occupying an itchy stasis between the threat of explosive motion and the eventual release, while ‘Secondary Actor’ leans into a poppier territory with its lushness and fever dream missteps.
There’s even a pivot toward folk, with ‘The Perfect Candidate’ offering a haunted seven minutes of sparse finger plucking and Valentine’s enveloping vocal range, the soulful croon falling into anxious jumbles and flattening out again. Against this, closer ‘YY’ is positively cinematic, the cool electronic flow underpinning the track’s progression. A fitting end to a remarkable record.
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Fucking Hell is out now and available from the No Home Bandcamp page.