Album Review: Make Money From Home, Make Money From Home
Posted in Reviews on February 26th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Comprised of 10 tracks that bring harmony-topped not-quite-gazing grunge contemplations, deep running tonal heft and an abiding sense of quirk that makes the material all the more expansive and multifaceted, inMake Money From Home‘s self-recorded, self-released and self-titled debut — in addition to sounding huge; Will Mellor (Heavy Temple) mixed at Red Water Recording — is nothing if not dug in. Running a total of 53 minutes, the album signals its course early in the moody and subdued verses of “Lumber,” carried by James Udinski‘s ride cymbal, light strum of bass from Emily Brown (also vocals and cover design) and the guitar and vocals of Bill O’Sullivan.
One might recall O’Sullivan from his prior band, the Brooklyn-based Eggnogg, who also had a penchant for gosh-darn-heavy riffing, the occasional cosmos-scorching blues solo, and personality. Based in Philadelphia, Make Money From Home are distinguished certainly in atmosphere from O’Sullivan‘s previous outfit, and the vocal interplay with Brown on pieces like “Frozen Over,” the brief and semi-twanged “The Evening Ball,” “Stable,” the chorus of “What is it For,” and so on, is a noteworthy strength that’s apparently at root in the band; Make Money From Home seems to have started out acoustically circa 2020 with O’Sullivan and Brown singing together.
A certain folkishness persists in what they do now — certainly in the wit of the lyrics and the occasionally lush vocal melodies — but Make Money From Home sound intentional in their weighted distortion. Accordingly, folk is only part of it, alongside grunge, classic mid-paced stonerly roll and even a bit of Electric Wizard as second/longest cut “Alarum” (8:34) reinvents the riff to “The Chosen Few” toward its own ends in languid post-Nirvana drawl.
“Alarum” is one of two songs over eight minutes, and the other, “Pistols at Dawn” manifests the Western edge hinted at in its title, serving as one of several diversions around the heavy-grunge crux of Make Money From Home, the movement changing from a ‘lumber’ — derp see what I did there? — to a sway in “Pistols at Dawn,” a rockabilly-style swing in “Ever and More” and ’90s-nerd-rock bounce in “Flew the Coop.”
These shifts in intent, coupled with the consistency of performance from O’Sullivan and Brown — whose basslines make “Ever and More” one of the best examples of a heavy jazz-swing I’ve come across; it’s a tough balance to strike — result in a record that sounds like it knows where it wants to be and how it wants to explore around that. That this isn’t O’Sullivan‘s first time leading a band on guitar and lead vocals is apparent in the confidence of his voice throughout; a bluesy, low register that’s able to slip into more guttural but still clean delivery as called for in a given song.
And the album very much plays out as a collection of songs. Flow between them, with methodical tempos from the outset in “Lumber” and “Alarum,” rampant melody and varied structures from one piece to the next assuring that the trio don’t seem to linger anywhere for longer than they want to. True, the listening experience isn’t a minor investment — a runtime north of the 50-minute line feeling in itself like a reference to the 1990s; but who knows if or when Make Money From Home will do anything else, so I’m not holding it against them — but the rewards are there for repeat listens, as a lyric like, “Some sleep afloat, I’ll drown awake” belted out at the end of “Lumber” or the sheepishness in O’Sullivan‘s voice as he stops all that shouting in “Flew the Coop” and apologizes in the verse croon, “Pardon me, I didn’t mean to raise my voice so loud/Threw back a bunch of meds floating on a cloud/Gotta hand it to you, doc, it really shuts it out/I really shouldn’t talk so proud/Should’ve shut my mouth…” and continues a balladeering-type story of what might’ve been a mental health invervention and in any case is way more fun as a song than it probably was to live through. So it goes. “Flew the Coop” is a standout, and so is “Stable” and “Frozen Over” (that layered shred! for ambience no less!), “Lumber,” “The Evening Ball,” “What is it For,” “Alarum,” “New Clown,” “Pistols at Dawn,” and “Ever and More.” That’s the whole record, in no particular order.
It’s telling that some of the most resonant stretches are the quietest. Maybe that’s Brown and O’Sullivan in the hook of “What is it For,” a sleek groove there that “Flew the Coop” of all songs will answer back to later, vulnerable and trying to be silly to cover it, or maybe it’s O’Sullivan laying out oddball connections in “Pistols at Dawn,” the bridge lines, “I’m content with four blank walls/What’s a reader to do?” prompting any number of potential answers. Read? I don’t know. In any case, while there’s no doubt Make Money From Home revel in the outright crush of “Lumber” when it kicks in, even as a first record, these songs offer more realization than a single idea or genre designation wants to convey.
There’s an adventurousness of songwriting that O’Sullivan has to some degree carried over from his last band, but Make Money From Home sounds more like a beginning than a continued thread, and the direction the material takes is its own thing, rooted in a bluesy style that still somehow lets the solo later in “Pistols at Dawn” sound like Jerry Cantrell as the jam starts to come apart, only to have “Ever and More” sweep in, not quite as manic as “Flew the Coop,” where ‘manic’ is the point, but a toe tapper just the same. And in “Flew the Coop,” like “The Evening Ball,” “Stable” and even arguably the develops-more-each-time hook of “Frozen Over,” storytelling lets the band make an impression in persona and craft alike.
I could sit here and bloviate uninformed on where Make Money From Home‘s progression might take them in the future — it might even be fun — but I don’t know anything, wouldn’t want to hazard a prediction when diversity of songwriting is so much at play, and generally feel like these pieces and the front-to-back entirety merit consideration on their own terms in the now. This is one of the best debut albums I’ve heard thus far into 2025, and one of the best albums, period, and I look forward to hearing how its character develops over the rest of this year and beyond.
