I often consider why I write music reviews. In my most fatalistic moments I wonder why I invest so much time writing these reviews if, when the big one comes, there will be no one left to listen to the glorious or shitty music I have laboriously studied in effort to form some sort of qualitative opinion and in turn effectively communicate that in writing. I wonder if I could have been doing something more important if, in fact, such an end actually exists. And then, I take a deep breath and I think back to the time I first heard “Gold World” off of Aloha’s 2007 release Light Works. I remember being in my car on a snowy night and hearing, “we were bound to go/cover our whole world in gold/from my doorway I can see into the future.” If our lives can be made to feel more important by a stranger’s thoughts put to tape, and amplified sound waves extend infinitely through the universe, I find a lot of comfort in the idea that moments like these have some sort of cosmic worth.

Intense right? Well, Aloha doesn’t mince words nor concepts on the “heaviest” (in the musical sense) album of their career. Home Acres is also their heaviest album when measured by the net gross of cool and collected, yet downright devastating phrases packed into 42 minutes. These may not be apparent on the surface, Aloha likes to slip these into the corners of bright indie-rock songs, but give it some time and Home Acres will find you wringing out your deepest fears and hopes at an hour when you should really be in bed.

After releasing 2006’s universally acclaimed prog-pop tour-de-force Some Echoes and their equally lauded, stripped-down acoustic EP Light Works, Aloha’s opening announcement of a bass drum pedal being hammered to the floor, and a driving bassline on “Building A Fire” sound downright explosive. This concentrated repackaging of Cale Park’s most propulsive moments lock the song into a focused canter of laser beam intensity. Guitars come in quick, staccato bursts; barely melodic but hardly atonal, breaking the minimalist percussion show just enough to make themselves felt, and then exiting as quickly as they entered. After an announcement this compelling, “Moonless March” begins to unpack the kinetic interplay between Lipple’s lisping vocals (buried under layers of distortion) and vibraphone arrangements, and Park’s virtuoso percussion. “Moonless March” has been a longstanding crowd favorite; Aloha has been kicking the song around since at least early 2007 and its belated appearance on a full-length album benefits from years of tinkering, making it the album’s immediate standout single. Barely changing tempo from “Building a Fire,” “Moonless March” is Parks at his most jaw-droppingly frantic while still sounding amazingly cohesive.

If you have been on the good-ship Aloha for the past 10 years you will forgive my spending the bulk of the article on these first two songs. There is little in the way of the hyper-complex arrangements of Some Echoes and only some of the aural warmth of Light Works on these two songs. Aloha has stripped down their arrangements to the brass tacks of rock song instrumentation. This idea of doing more with less set the stage for the rest of the album. Aloha burrows deep into the verse-chorus pop song arrangements to unearth bottomless instrumentation, filling in any white space and exercising themes of paradoxical modern living and geographic dislocation. The vibes and mellotron still play a prominent role in the Aloha soundscape, augmenting Parks’ stage-stealing percussion work. This decided lyrical and musical venture into the gray (just look at the cover) inspire the galloping 4/4 motorik beat that exudes a cool aloofness on “Cold Storage.” The track bemoans a soul-sucking urban existence before Lipple betrays his own sense of despondency by shouting “I’m waiting for an answer!” Even in the midst of the direst of songs, Aloha don’t totally buy into easy nihilistic cop-outs.

Crawling out of the self-imposed Siberian exile is the sentiment on “Waterwheel,” a semi-mystic rumination on existence reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s short film Village of Watermills. Watermills, in that film, represent the concept of cyclic rebirth and the transitory nature of life. Lipple posits “two hands on the waterwheel/the cold creek runs through everyone from here.” I can dig that. While we may not have total control over the course of our lives, there are quite a few things that we can control, and while we may not immediately see the direct results of our actions, they do exist somewhere down the line. Moments like these make me glad I am listening to this album for the express purpose of revealing some of its mysteries to others. Even if the world ends (please let it end after March 9th so you can hear this) at least I got a glimpse of something really wonderful.

I wonder if Spring gets off on being withholding. It comes at a time when you are past looking forward to it; it comes when you are comfortably settled within the cool hues of gray winter skies. Home Acres, while decidedly overcast, still retains a lining of the group’s entry-level stabs at making sense of the universe. 2010 finds Aloha a little older and a little wiser, like your smart older brother saying, “look, I don’t have all the answers. I’m just as confused as you are.”

Track List:
1. Building A Fire
2. Moonless March
3. Microviolence
4. Searchlight
5. Everything Goes My Way
6. White Wind
7. Cold Storage
8. Blackout
9. Waterwheel
10. I'm In Trouble
11. Ruins