Laura Mock’s home//body EP is a flawless folk-pop amalgam that ties her Maine influence with her new New York City dwellers’ life. This record contains five songs, and it revolves around one main concept of Home – broken further into Home the Place, Home the People, and Home the Self. Mock has potential for raw, exposed sounding ballads and there’s also the shimmering pop sensibility and country-inflected danceable beat that also comes out of the song.
Starting with “Acadia,” Mock does not leave her listeners disappointed, and begins with a lovely piano/vocal melody. The track portrays the journey between wanting to grow up to embrace a sense of newness and the bitter sweet feeling that ‘home’ is not long the same. Literal translation of the word “Acadia” comes from the Greek meaning a place for the rural peace; hence the song is autobiographic and at the same time a universal tune mapping the human disquiet and change.
There are some real highlights on the EP: ‘Landlocked’, with gently picked guitar and string sections, is about the steadying nature of relationships, while the fizzy ‘Rocky Shores’ provides a rip-roaring closer, referencing the jagged coastline of Maine. The nature of the optimism married to ‘Rocky Shores’ is country-fied, closing out an album tumultuous in its emotional detail.
The complexity of Mock’s production approach is particularly evident on ‘CTC’, the song that is the most colourful pop song of the EP. Happy, dancing melodies provide a bright and hope filled contrast to the morose sounds of “Ribs”, a dark searching song about insecurity. While there is a sense of grandness inherent to the production of the singles; from the country-infused “Acadia” to the boygenius-influenced energy of “CTC” or the string-injected urgency of “Landlocked”, Mock’s artistry is personal.
Musically, it is equally diverse as conceptual: the instrumentation throughout all of “home//body” is one that combines piano, acoustic guitar, strings and a grain of electronics deep within. Every song in the tracklist is designed to create emotional anxiety, which is familiar to listeners when it comes to addressing the issue of belongingness.
When it comes to defining the notion of a home, Laura Mock’s first-ever studio-length release is not only a record but a concept one at that. With her poetic lyricism and her crystal clear voice, she directs a fresh artistic approach to folk-pop genre for a new generation, “ home // body” is a call to meditate, to desire and to find comfort in the concept of getting lost for finding a place to be.
