Home Videos – Home Taping is Killing Music
For a band that first introduced themselves with quiet, acoustic whispers, Rochester’s Home Videos is making a hell of a lot of noise on their debut full-length, Home Taping is Killing Music. Arriving a full six years after their initial EP, the album is the sound of that same band plugging in and turning everything up. The tentative, lo-fi beginnings have been traded for ringing guitars and crashing crescendos, marking a powerful and deliberate evolution from where they started. Home Taping is Killing Music is our album of the week.
The title feels like an inside joke for a band that lives and breathes DIY. According to their Bandcamp, Home Taping… was recorded “slowly 2023 – 2025 by us on a 4-track cassette in a basement in Rochester, NY.” You wouldn’t guess it from the sound, which punches well above its weight. It’s a far cry from the lo-fi hiss of their first EP, landing in a ‘mid-fi’ sweet spot that puts the band’s time spent fleshing these songs out on perfect display. The band self-describes as “slacker tapehead indie nonsense” and warns, “we are loud now. wear earplugs.” They’re not wrong. The sound borrows from the twinkly, intricate guitar lines of Midwest emo and the patient, heavy moods of slowcore, often letting those elements collide in waves of post-rock noise. It’s a space where fans of American Football, Explosions in the Sky, and early Death Cab for Cutie can all find common ground.
The album moves with a real sense of purpose, from the eerie, reversed loop of opener “daehdeb” right into the shimmering guitars of “underwater breathing.” This track is a great mission statement: a jazzy, understated verse gives way to a chorus where the distortion dial is cranked and the volume swells, the lyrics neatly summing up the dynamic shift: “I can’t feel anything / until I feel it all at once.” Home Videos are no strangers to those peaks and valleys, letting songs like “the devil’s credit score” drift on a beautifully textured guitar melody before launching into a massive, cinematic instrumental finish. Those peaks are a recurring theme on the record and they feel earned every time.
Some of the strongest moments here are full-band reworkings of older, acoustic tracks. “instant coffee,” once a skeletal demo, is now a fully formed slow-burner, thick with atmosphere. But the biggest transformation is reserved for “roof rack or cop lights.” The new version weaponizes the paranoia of its title with tense, driving chords and propulsive drumming that channels the raw-nerve energy of Elliott Smith’s work with Heatmiser. There’s a seamlessness in the way the band works in some of the fragility from the song’s 2019 version alongside the distorted onslaught, and it hits just right on the new version.
There’s a transitional quality that haunts Home Taping is Killing Music, like the feeling of the air changing before a storm or the final moments of dusk. The record captures this mood perfectly, and crystalizes it on “don’t walk away” with one simple, poignant observation: “you know the summer never lasts.” It’s a bitter little reminder as I write this in the middle of July, but the ability to bottle such a fleeting feeling across 12 tracks makes for a stunningly effective debut for Home Videos. Head over to their bandcamp page and preorder the cassette for a little emotional support for when those days start getting shorter.
Categorised in: Album of the Week
This post was written by Ronald Walczyk