Album Review- Vacations- No Place Like Home

I have been quite interested in the generational music divide. 

People my age generally had some commonality which I attribute mostly to MTV and its alternative music kingmaker 120 Minutes. We all knew the popular band and it seemsd like the mags like Spin and Alternative Press, college radio and everything else fell in line behind. When I talk to someone my age, we have the same references. 

When I talk to someone 15 years younger, they don’t get my references. Names like Psychedelic Furs or Horton Heat are meaningless. But it goes both ways. I am not sure how this generation consumes music. 

I suppose it’s multiple things like Spotify curated playlists, alt rock radio, Pandora streams, viral TikTok videos, TV and movie soundtracks, hipster blogs, tastemaker YouTube shows, Reddit threads and so on. Perhaps some secret dark web that only those under 35 have access to, for all I know. Still, these bands have millions of listeners and pack concert halls (though not always, a common modern problem is determining if streams can equal ticket sales). I used to feel I know the scope of everything but those days are gone. 

Australian band Vacations feel like a group that straddles both lines. They get play on Sirius XMs “College Rock” station which echoes the old guard commonality. Their sound is old school too. Dream Pop probably most accurately describes their blend of psych, shoe gaze, and Smiths jangle. To my ear, I hear comparisons to another Antipodean band San Cisco and Midwest bedroom pop artist Yot Club. Vacations do market themselves as Australia’s biggest boy band and their biggest moment is from a TikTok for their 2016 song “Young” and their 2018 song “Telephones” appropriately about being obsessed with our phone. For a band that sprung to life like many of their age from Tumblr and SoundCloud, that shouldn’t be a big deal. But the 90s sound of dream pop is what lures me in and I dig their sound.