album: This Land is Your Landfill — The Homeless Gospel Choir
words: aaron eisenreich
Do you ever get the sense that reality is just a sea of garbage that you’re surfing though, trying to stay afloat? Well, Derek Zanetti of The Homeless Gospel Choir knows how you feel. His latest release, This Land is Your Landfill, finds Pittsburgh’s punk rock Woody Guthrie joining forces with a stellar group of musicians, cranking up the volume, and delivering his finest album yet. The sense of community and connection that comes from collaborating with a full band helps to balance lyrics focusing on political turmoil, religious rhetoric, and social anxiety.
Never one to mince words, Zanetti begins the record with “Global Warming,” a blunt song highlighted by the fat, distorted bass that kicks the whole thing off. Next are “Don’t Compare” and “Social Real Estate,” both dealing with the mental strain of social media with lyrics like “I needed something to distract me / so I smashed my telephone / I acted lonesome most of winter / I never felt so at home.” In the end though—as with much of The Homeless Gospel Choir’s back catalog—the ultimate messages are positive, uplifting, and self-affirming as he sings “Don’t you dare compare yourself to anyone but you.”
Next is “Art Punk,” a fantastic song accented by the backing vocals which add a new and welcome element to the band’s sound. In a lot of ways, songs like “Art Punk” seem to be the logical next step from The Homeless Gospel Choir’s last album, Normal, which started to add more instrumentation to Zanetti’s previous acoustic-based sound.
The album’s centerpiece, “You Never Know” is surely The Homeless Gospel Choir’s most ambitious song to date, and arguably one of their best. With just acoustic guitar, vocals, and accordion, the song starts like a yinzer punk’s “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” accented with pointed lyrical turns such as “the cops are a-killing and the oil rigs a-spilling / our shit president and his shitty children.” From there, the rest of the band kicks on for a raucous, off-kilter singalong backed by a ripping guitar solo.
“Young and Love” kicks off the second half of the record by celebrating that almost ineffable feeling you get from going to a small concert venue and seeing one of your favorite bands tear through a killer forty-minute set (or tear through a set yourself). It’s followed by “Lest We Forget,” a song with Zanetti taking an honest and forthright look in the mirror, ending on the thought “I’m afraid of when the phone rings / afraid the phone will never ring again.”
Although much of the album features the full band and makes the most of the new possibilities opened up, there is still some room for the acoustic guitar. “A Dream About the Internet” is a lo-fi beauty that ends with the image “all the cop cars are on fire when I close my eyes at night.” There’s also “Figure it Out,” probably the song that sounds most like Zanetti’s previous work, and acts a great pep talk for anyone feeling the weight of simply navigating through life.
“Blind Faith” takes on the inextricable link between Evangelical Christians and reactionary right-wing politics, with biting lines like “potato sack rat race / last place pays for the wall” and “locker room talk / the perverted word of god.” It’s a great singalong for anyone who grew up in the church and is now “finally sure that there is nothing more than this.”
The group brings the album to a close with “Punk as Fuck,” a song I personally cannot wait to scream along to at a show at some point. Halfway through the song, the group kicks into a jam featuring a trombone line reminiscent of older ska and west coast punk that instantly brought me back to my teenage years. It’s a fun and fitting end to the record and sure to be a concert closer for years to come.