Brian Duricy - Phantom Posse - 'Home' Review [tekst, tłumaczenie i interpretacja piosenki]

Phantom Posse: Home Is Wherever I’m Not

The title of Phantom Posse’s astoundingly cohesive Home immediately gives us a heartwarming aim, but the thesis is quite less so; home, the album goes on to assert, is wherever these artists are not. Over the course of fourteen songs, four of which lack any lyrics, the collective never reach this fabled destination, but instead find their closest attempts mirroring the liminal stage embodied by Édouard Levé’s essay ‘When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue’, ‘When I am returning from a trip, the best part is not going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you’re still traveling, but not really.’ Home is an album in constant flux, and one that never ceases to impress because of it

Stylistically, the album is marketed as ‘chillwave’, but the sounds extend far deeper than that singularity. ‘The Road Is My Home’ is iLoveMakonnen gone country, while ‘Family Tree’ sounds like a lost Radical Face cut; ‘Isometric’ might be the grooviest chillwave put to record, and ‘She Gets Lonely’ pairs Makonnen’s raw voice with an R&B premise. This frenetic jumping of genres that are all grounded, in some way, by the chillwave aesthetic, find their greatest foundation in that unreachable location of home. Like Zeno’s paradox, they continually find themselves progressing toward this location, but will never actually reach it

For this reason, Home will last far longer than its under-the-radar release suggests. The simplistic lyrics don’t allow the listener into these artists’s worlds, they unearth the truth that their world is just the same as ours. Unlike the out-of-reach relatability of, say, ‘When you’re blowing eighty-five days in the middle of France’, the posse provides the blunt honesty of ‘I dream about things you wouldn’t find appealing’ and how ‘Ice rain on my window’ is the world’s worst thing. All because, of course, that prevents the travel that underlies this whole album

I wrote this review while listening, with two of my close friends, to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. An album that exemplifies egoistic opulence and all that comes with being and knowing you’re a genius, that has made writing about Home that much easier. Because not everybody’s a genius. Not everybody lives within themselves. Most of us live at home, and we would do anything to be there