Aloha – Home Acres

You Can’t Go Home Again

Perhaps it’s the distance between band members that makes this album so confusing or maybe it’s what they were striving for. Aloha’s album Home Acres gushes out a whirlpool of emotions at once with no conceivable plan or intentions. Each of the four members in Aloha are scattered across Cleveland, Brooklyn, Boston, and Washington D.C. To create this album, they did everything via the internet. In their defense, it does work out nicely coming from that standpoint.

It seems like with a bit of organization, they would have had this one in the bag. The whole album seems to jump around with different themes that all clash at the end. Home Acres opens with “Building a Fire,” which starts with lots of momentum, loud, hard instruments and a soft, calm and collected vocal accompaniment, making it a decent start. That said, they do tend to repeat themselves a lot during the song, making none of the lyrics really stand out among the rest.

“White Wind” is surprisingly the best song on the album. It’s a slow simple song but it leaves out all of the distractions that the rest of the songs have. It has a pure sound and seems like the lyrics actually mean something to them. Finally, the energy that you hoped for from Aloha is present in the closing “Waterwheel.”  It has a surprisingly agreeable guitar solo which comes far too late in the song for people to appreciate.

Aloha could have become a prog-pop sensation but instead turned out to be quite the bust. The organization just isn’t there and most songs need an extra lift to take them to the next level. Maybe they will surprise us in their next album, or they will continue to be predictable.