On a different stage

September 27, 2016 03:47 pm | Updated November 01, 2016 09:20 pm IST - Bengaluru

Artist: Touché Amoré; Album: Stage Four

The album cover

The album cover

It’s still less than a decade for American hardcore/emo band Touché Amoré in existence, but they’ve had about four full-length albums and a few split EPs. Their debut full-length, … To the Beat of a Dead Horse was about 18 minutes long and their soul-crushing second album, Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me , was 20 minutes. These were compact emotional outbursts from the band that held listeners’ attention because of its content – like the best emo bands, it was about relationships, loss, failure and more.

But something about vocalist Jeremy Bolm’s harsh, reckless delivery of refrains and pointed criticisms became the best thing about the band. Even when lyrics mattered the most, Touché Amoré built upon a punk/hardcore sound that occasionally made way for a clean comedown of guitar lines and slow drumming. And then it would explode again.

On their fourth album, Stage Four , the sonic direction changes slightly - guitarists Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhardt, bassist Tyler Kirby and drummer Elliot Babin aren’t just hammering it down, but also adding flourishes of melodies that can compound the head-rush you get from (eventually) singing along with Bolm.

What can be more heartbreaking than hearing 11 tracks of Bolm trying to come to terms with his mother’s passing away due to cancer? “How has it already been a year? I skip over songs because they’re too hard to hear,” Bolm screams on the ‘New Halloween’. He confesses he hasn’t found the courage hear his mother’s last message to him. The image of California’s palm trees are conjured with the shoegazing guitar lead on ‘Rapture’ and ‘Palm Dreams’, each song becoming more intense than the next.

Bolm is so direct with this pain and grief on songs like ‘Displacement’, displaying his struggle with faith in God, something his mother still believed in. Straight from the opening lines of “You died at 69 with a body full of cancer/I asked your god how could you? But never heard an answer” there is this familiarity of Touché Amoré’s intention of being as direct as possible, and yet somehow making it relatable.

On their longest songs yet – ‘Benediction’ and ‘Water Damage’ – the band moves beyond the bursts of hardcore into steady structures, even Bolm trying his hand at clean vocals. And finally on ‘Skyscraper’, with the help of songstress Julien Baker, there is a beautiful acceptance for Bolm as he trudges on each word, “You live there/Under the lights.” A hugely overwhelming way to end what is a devastating album.

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