#45

#45. Hockey Dad - Homely Feeling (#54, 2017)

9th of 2017

Listen

There's a listing on the Wikipedia article for Hockey Dad's debut album "Boronia" that suggests Jeff Rosenstock produced it. It got me interested with a chance to remark upon the idea that he must have been doing some miniature tour of Australia at the time, to go with his Smith Street Band credits. That's a generally interesting thought and would add an extra layer to the ascent of Hockey Dad. While I do find myself fascinated by Wikipedia anti-rabbit holes, the problem tends to be the sheer lack of secondary sources anywhere, unless you're unlucky enough to have seen it spread across from that initial made up fact. We're talking about a band here who were barely out of high school. Nothing about the album feels like the sound of different personnel. Largely just Hockey Dad as we know them, though a bit more mellow than the later years.

That's the album that largely put Hockey Dad on the map though. A handful of songs that got triple j airplay. The breakthrough was slow though. "I Need A Woman" has amassed a lot of streams now, but couldn't make a big impression in the moment (I have it at #298 in my counted Instagram votes for that year). If you need something to compare that with, two years later, they got to #184 with "A Night Out With", which I had at #174 in my tally. That's a promising progression, but then so is Disco Stu's chart of disco record sales. It was time for Hockey Dad to prove themselves, and we're sitting on that breakthrough moment right now.

Getting into the Hottest 100 for the first time is one of the easiest ways to tell people who are just trudging behind the cutting edge that a new main character has emerged. I call it the preview hit because the 12 months that pass between countdown votes allow everyone to react to the result accordingly. We're all much happier to put in our chips on something with proven viability than pure speculation. A common trend is for people to hesitate even putting one of their 10 votes down on an artist who likely won't make it, even if they're much closer than realised. It's a reliable contributor to that common feeling that some artists just seem to show up time and time again on the list. "Homely Feeling" is Hockey Dad's submission to be part of that social circle. With 6 further appearances and another 6 that landed in the Hottest 200, it's hard to deny the results. And yes, I am one of those people who started paying attention to them on the back of this impressive result, and a hit that can't be denied.

"Homely Feeling" clocks in at a very brisk 2:21 in length. Every subsequent entry they've had is longer, including one that's more than twice as long and will appear later on this list. It can be treading a fine line when you do this. Cutting off the fluff maybe, but leaving little to chew on as well. I think upbeat rock songs have a way around this. "Buy Me A Pony" by Spiderbait is my prime example. It's incredibly short but gets away with it because it never really feels like the band is cutting corners, doubling the length of the first verse when it feels like it's gearing up for the chorus. I also think of the even shorter "Forever Malcolm Young" by Frenzal Rhomb, which stretches the definition of a verse, but nonetheless gets through three of them, and even an instrumental bridge. The core pieces of a song are all there and it's done in under 90 seconds. 

"Homely Feeling"'s contribution to this notion is the inclusion of a pre-chorus section to stretch it out. The whole song is basically over by the time the second chorus is reached. I've never felt short-changed by it because the song's high points are so sought after that I don't want anything to get in the way of it. You can sense that they're onto something right from the song's slimy opening riff and how tightly they string it all together after that. You know what my idea of a "Sweet Release" (#717) is? It's the moment in the song where everything comes crashing down together. The massive drum fills, the locked in guitars, and the huge cathartic 'Saaaaaaaaay'. If the whole thing is a vehicle for a single moment, then it's definitely one of the best. I was incessantly replaying the song for it. When I download songs for my Hottest 100 collection, I usually spend the better part of a year until I log a 10th play of it, but "Homely Feeling" waltzed over the line with some extra change in about 5 weeks. Very rarely I felt quite as disappointed in myself for not seeing the magic sooner, and it'd take me quite a while before it felt like I could pay Hockey Dad back for this one.