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Homeland isn't so much an album as it is a poetic capturing of the still moments of a restless mind.
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Referencing everything from Aristophanes to Kierkegaard to Oprah Winfrey, Homeland is true to the popular/classical crossover spirit of Anderson's best work.
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Regardless of where you stand politically, theologically or environmentally, or even with regards to the challenging, avant-garde nature of her sound, you cannot deny the power of Anderson's Homeland, one of the most riveting and poignant accounts of post-9/11 America pop music has offered to date.
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An extraordinary album: Homeland, the iconic New Yorker's first new record in nearly a decade, is a tough, engrossing swirl of avant-garde electro-pop and sociopolitically exasperated spoken word, tracing the greed and desolation and gnawing confusion of this brave new American era.
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This record is expansive in its own way. The melodic fragments and the underpinning harmonies are conventional and attractive.
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That angelic, robotic voice is often reprised on Homeland, her first new album in a decade, which fans will welcome as an heir to her definitive performance piece, United States. It's also a perfect starting point; an exquisite state-of-the-union dispatch as only Anderson, America's darkly comic conscience, can provide.
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There are still witticisms aplenty, but the overall effect is an air of creeping dread, the perfect soundtrack for a journey into America's night.
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UncutIn its purely audio form it's a hauntingly powerful set of pieces, couching barbed, provocative lyrics in music vastly more affecting than its apparent simplicity seems to warrent. [Jul 2010, p.101]
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Homeland is literally the most accessible Anderson recording since 1982's "Big Science" and easily stands among her masterworks.
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Homeland's biggest achievement is to sculpt a lot of minutes of material--both new tracks and ones she's been playing live for years--into something that feels textured and whole, rather than fatly fragmented.
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Homeland sees Anderson singing of a "Transitory Life," but by this point, it's clear her art will remain a permanent monument in pop culture. For as long as that culture lasts.
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FilterHer own work is similarly cyclical, not new or old, but existing in a timeless realm of hypnotically haunted whimsy. [Spring/Summer 2010, p.110]
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The innovative, at times baffling result is part performance art, part avant-garde symphony, with the occasional Kierkegaard joke thrown in for good measure.
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The meat of the album, however, is explicitly political, and its showstopper is "Only an Expert," which melds global warming, bank bailouts, Oprah Winfrey and roaring guitar feedback from Anderson's hubby, Lou Reed.
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Over the course of roughly an hour, the glacial-to-moderate pace may lose some listeners along the way, but rewards come from setting aside the time to settle in for the full flight, as with the slow build on the more personal "The Lake."
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Q MagazineShe's neutered without her live visuals and her half-spoken, often-treated vocals can grate, but her breadth of vision remians unparalleled. [Jul 2010, p.128]
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MojoHomeland wrestles with US foreign policy and economic collapse but is at its besy when simply capturing the spectral strangeness of the everyday. [Jul 2010, p.102]
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