Over the last ten years, Anchor Thieves has quietly become one of the most interesting bands to watch in Nashville. Diving into their catalog of releases reaching back to 2011’s Prerequisite to the most recent release Delete Delete / Enormous Normalcy (today, Aug 13), the band has grown from being a solid-and-enjoyable rock band into an outfit that feels unfettered by expectations or style implementations. There is no clear line of delineation when this change occurred – natural growth tends to happen slowly over time – but here we find ourselves with a new album, a new video and plenty of new surprises.
The official video for “Home” takes you on a gentle journey through a dollhouse before it is set aflame and burns to the ground. The lyrics “celebrate me when I’m gone, amongst the dirt and rust and limestone gravel*” are bleak but delivered beautifully. It’s a simple video but the dichotomy of visual and audio pair quite well as a reminder of the finite nature of it all.
The track itself is the lead song from Delete Delete, one of the two aforementioned releases the band has coupled together. They jokingly proclaim “Don’t call it a double album” over on Bandcamp but it’s a fourteen track undertaking split down the middle stylistically… it’s hard not to call a spade a spade. That said, Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness this is not. The curse of the “Double Record” is real but if any band can pull it off, it’s Anchor Thieves. They’ve quietly and consistently proven that they suffer no lack of ideas and their execution is more than capable of pulling them off. “Home” provides another opportunity to burn your preconceived notions of the band down and immerse yourself in what they’re offering.
* best guess on lyrics but you get the point