By: Case Harrison
Just like people from the south make songs about BBQ, beers, and the American flag, Home Is Where, a southern emo queer band from Palm Coast, Florida, makes songs about 13 Elvis impersonators dying in a horrible car crash. Hunting Season, like the car crash itself, is bombastic, exploding with harmonicas, slide guitars, theremins and might be my favorite album from this year. The aim for this album is to “make the great American song” according to their Bandcamp page (which is also populated with caricatures of Homer Simpson) and even though they established themselves as part of Florida’s punk emo scene, this is one of the best southern rock albums you’ll ever hear. I have been blasting this from front to back, listening to the headbanging harmonica and vocal riffs from “migration patterns,” along with the passionate vocals and powerful electric guitar played by Tilley on “milk & diesel.”
Most of the songs speak from the perspective of the people either reacting to the news of the Elvis car crash or coping with the accident. Some see the event and react with rage by setting themselves on fire in front of their boss like in the first song of the album “reptile house,” while some ignore the explosion happening and instead focus on the wonderful Shenandoah National Park located in Washington D.C in the song of the same title. Some songs focus on the perspective of the Elvis car drivers themselves.
“roll tide” is the longest and craziest song on the album, steeping at exactly 10 minutes. It starts off with the singer, possibly in the perspective of one of the drivers, talking about the mundanity of life and wanting to see the light. While doing this, she tries to find some representation of feeling by shouting out the chant of the Alabama Tide football team. It then slowly leads to a cacophony of noise created by electric guitars and drums. sounding like a rising climax before transmutating to an implosion of noise involving newscasters detailing the horrifying accident forming in the traffic. The guitar blasts into a black-metal distortion that sounds like it’s detailing the agonies of the disaster. The next song is called “drive-by-mooning.” This is a short but fun song with a peachy harmonica tune that wraps things up rather nicely with the entire band singing “home is where forever;” a sense of community and hope in this bittersweet ending.
There is a very clear message threading the songs together in Hunting Season with their very tongue-in-cheek track titles and free-form pacing. It is where people cope with horrifying events that have happened in America by pointing out the absurd funniness of living in it or overlooking it as a natural occurrence.
Another key thing that makes the album special is the Trans-woman lead singer of the group, Bea McDonald. Her vocals in “roll tide” and many other songs are electric and loud as the car crash, screaming stream-of-consciousness lyrics with a southern twang and a passionate heart (I love how she says the fourth of July in “bike week”). The mix of screamo and southern rock in her voice turns into a kind of gospel that proudly represents the emotion of confronting the absurd destruction that is happening around them and then trying to move on in this burning world.
Bea and Tilley Komorny, the head guitarist, are both trans-women living in the South. Florida has a long history of putting up anti-trans bills routinely. In 2023, Ron DeSantis used several bills to ban gender-affirming care, children from attending drag shows, and certain curriculums in school that talk about gender identity and sexual orientation. As the world continues on, it keeps burning. What progress that trans people have made in history seem to be slowly backsliding in the most nonsensical way possible. The level of hatred and anger that the world holds is absurd and Home is Where recognizes that f***ed up farce in their album and in their music as they find a way to rock out despite the circumstances. They see the explosion happening in their windshield and try to find ways to keep going forward.
In the song “stand-up special,” the chorus sings “nothing changes as much as nothing stays the same.” I feel like this marks the message of the song where the world seems to be never moving but always bringing new horrible surprises. Like an Elvis car crash, there could be a catastrophic event or impact that shouldn’t have happened and yet people move on and treat it as a quick spectacle. It might not sound like this should be about America as a whole, but now living in 2025 and seeing the state of the world right now, it sure does feel like seeing a horrible wreckage that people guffaw at for a sense of sanity.
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