When we write, we often do so in an aspirational way. We romanticise the mundane details of our everyday lives and place ourselves inside some grander narrative. The uncanny familiarity of the latest project from HOMESHAKE, ‘CD Wallet’ contests this trope. There is a refusal to push forward, giving into the current as you are pulled back toward your past. Written over the course of a year in his home studio in Toronto, ‘CD Wallet’ finds Peter Sagar, aka HOMESHAKE, bewitched by a city thousands of miles away, his hometown of Edmondton.
“I hope I’ve got some place to be” Sagar croons on the album’s opening track ‘Frayed’, torn between the impossibly familiar details of your hometown and the forces that pull you away. We are ushered into the tones of the album, permeated with sadness and anxiety, but most of all an aching need to stay still and move at the same time, and the gnawing knowledge that it is impossible to do both.
The slick, grooving tones seen on HOMESHAKE’s earlier projects have been replaced with a fuzzy, dissonant, dream world. As the Duster-esque guitar of ‘Kitty’ takes a hold, Edmondton succumbs to an almost post-apocalyptic state. By the time we reach ‘Basement’, written as a celebration of the sanctuary Sagar found in his home’s basement since he was a teenager, the project has fully flourished. “I’m with my friends in the basement, happiest here in my basement” Sagar writes “Don’t gotta pretend in my basement, ‘Cause everything else is upstairs.”
This desire for escape, for refuge and home, is the most prominent theme of the album. It is certainly dark, but Sagar’s delve into slowcore is a resounding success in the impact it leaves. For fans who fell in love with HOMESHAKE’s playful, synth infused earlier works, the album may not resonate. but it is Sagar’s most honest project to date. There is a very real and inescapable loneliness to the album, and for those who know the feeling, it will feel like a hug when you need it most.
8/10
Words: Eve Boothroyd
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