CD REVIEW: The Hotel Year “It Never Goes Out”

The Hotel Year “It Never Goes Out”

                The Hotel Year is a band that evokes a range of different emotions in me.   They have a combination of a sound that lands somewhere between Saves the Day (when the songs get faster) and Piebald (when the songs get less fast), which has nothing to do with the multiple vocalists you’ll hear on “It Never Goes Out”.

                One of the easiest categories to toss a band like The Hotel Year into is emo.   This is simply because you can call them “emotional punk” or something along those lines, but it’s not really the whiny type of emo you’re probably used to hearing.    This is a different kind of emotion in the sense that while these songs can tend to be rather personal they can also be very relatable.   So again, this isn’t the “this girl broke my heart and now I’m going to cry about it” type of emo I grew up with but more of a thought provoking and heart evoking jolt of lyrics.

                Recently, I’ve been trying to stress the importance of lyrics in my reviews and in The Hotel Year I have finally found a band that makes me feel- lyrically- ways I haven’t felt since I first heard the first album from Bayside.     It’s just that good; I could pull quotes I like out from it all day.   Here are just a few though.

                The first song, “Our Lives Would Make a Sad, Boring Movie” has a focus on how the educational system doesn’t really prepare you for life and college is mainly just a signed piece of paper and lifetime of student loan debt.   It has the most excellent line of “If there’s one thing in your life that you’ll never forget it’s that we’re dead in our future, but we’re not dead yet”

                A song like “Weathered” pokes fun at the false idea of love being portrayed by Hallmark, Hollywood and Walmart.   “An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club” is a sad story about how friends fade away from one another and regardless of whether or not you ever went spray painting with someone, odds are you’ve grown apart from someone you wish you still spent your weekends with.    This is all of course shadowed by a quick minute long song called “Holiday” which features a group vocal scream of “Punk rock saved my fucking life”.

                Overall, man, this is some real punk rock music with meaning right here and you have to check this out.