I haven't listened to Home, Like Noplace is There by The Hotelier, but you can sort of tell that it was a dark and harrowing album simply by listening it to the album that came next. Goodness was released earlier this year, and it's a textbook example of a 'morning after the dark night of the soul' album. If you've heard Tomorrow Morning or Daisies of the Galaxy by the Eels, you'll know exactly what I mean; those albums were released after End Times (one of those break-up albums that compares the end of a relationship to the end of the world) and Electro-Shock Blues (a musical memoir of a period during which the songwriter lost his sister to suicide and his mother to cancer) respectively, and both are relatively bright and optimistic, hopeful glimmers of light at the end of two long, dark tunnels.
That's exactly what Goodness is. It has a 'back to nature' hippie commune kinda vibe, thanks in part to the outdoorsy renditions of popular lullaby I See the Moon that serve as interludes and in larger part to the artwork, which features a group of men and women standing naked in a field:
Fun fact: my copy of the Goodness
CD was packaged in a sleeve bearing a censored version of this image, because heaven forfend that anyone should accidentally see a boob or a willy.
Goodness evokes the feeling of going outside and feeling the sun on your skin for the first time in months. It's an album about emerging from a period of isolation and reconnecting, both with the people you love and with the world around you; it's about relocating your place in the universe and learning to love and share and feel at peace again, man.
