It feels like most of our life is spent denying the various ways we come to be.    The world fills the cavernous space around you, left vacant post-womb, and it feeds you and it shapes you and it pacifies you like a papi into believing you’re part of it.  And we think the world’s loud and it’s speaking to us, because it’s echoing off the emptiness inside us.  One of the most striking features of Total Warr’s ‘Feels Like Home video’ is how much silence and stillness seems to radiate every scene, even when movement is the focus. It’s eerie, it’s disconcerting, but it’s one of the most honest portrayals of modern life that will come out this year. On ‘Feels Like Home’ the band’s indefeasible spirit is so loud it silences all the white noise that punctuates, that fills our minds and ears with empty calories masquerading as meals.

‘Feels Like Home’ says it doesn’t matter what age you are. When we’re strong, when our youthful bruteness  gives us the illusion that our muscles can flex and swat away reality; and when youth has faded and muscles strain under the weight of water, we acquiesce to the feeling that because we played the game, because we are finishing out the last legs of this race, we’ve somehow won.  It’s all the same state.

This video is, in many ways, an ode to the absurdity of conformity. Whereas a video like Mira, Un Lobo’s ‘Serotonin’ exhorts you to exude the energy you want to be in the world to reclaim yourself–and it will come back to you–Total Warr’s strength and weirdness as people (visualized as freaks of nature in one scene)  is a useless sonar gun in a world that long ago went deaf to the sound of real feeling. There is no life—save only a small, wispy spark—in the  eyes of the bodybuilders, who by all accounts should be at radioactive levels of life. But there is a tinge of hopeful sadness in the band’s.

This has been one of my favorite songs of the year, and sure to land in my top 20.  And that’s because I’ve always felt out of place where I was. Throwing screams and fits of life into the void and hearing nothing back. So I threw myself instead on a jet plane and hurtled myself to another continent. hoping to hear the world. I haven’t found it yet, but the feeling of being at the mercy of your life seeking decisions in the lyrics:

Now you could do anything you want, so just do it
Cause there’s nowhere to look back, anyway
And together we can go so far, if you want it
Cause nobody’s waiting for us, anyway
Together we don’t need to know which way to go
We’ll find a place where the wind blows

Floored me the first time I heard it, and speaks to me still all these months later. The video only amplifies that. I don’t know where I’m going. I mean I have literally no fucking idea anymore. I think I lost the ability to care at the first taste of real freedom.  And there’s no one waiting for me, so I might as well find someone to follow me wandering, enjoying the moments of complete dispersal of self before we land in some place again that’s home. And as long as band’s like Total Warr make me realize I’m not alone until I find that person, that many of us are searching for that place that ‘Feels Like Home’, I can live with that uncertainty.

Total Warr are working on their debut LP, which should be out sometime soon. But for now, I really encourage you to:

Follow them on Soundcloud / Facebook for more updates.

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