Review Summary: Take this time to remember what we've done
With a bunch of below average albums under their belt, Touche Amore never really embraced the spirit of their self-titled EP. And that's a shame because this, a far cry from the dainty twinkles of
Is Survived By... or the flaccid Modern Life Is War posturing on
To the Beat..., is the most powerful the band have ever sounded.
Firstly, Jeremy Bolm has never sounded better than here. The typical decline in quality you see with most hardcore vocalists has obviously taken effect within Amore's discography as Bolm's vocals here sound like he's tearing his lungs out. The refrain on 'Honest Sleep' is about a thousand times more effective than its
To the Beat... counterpart thanks to his contributions, and though as a lyricist he had a way to go on this release the band really couldn't have chosen a better conduit for their hometown frustration.
Secondly, i can't say that i've ever been impressed by a Touche Amore riff prior to hearing this. They were never a 'heavy' band as such, but their new material features guitars so thin that any attempt to entice musical excitement results in entwinement with the far more impressive drums and thus become utterly irrelevant. Luckily, relevant is exactly what the guitars are here. Without them the downtuned walls of sound encasing 'Negotiating the Charade' would be absent, as would the Converge-esque dynamics of 'Huckleberry' and the strangulated bursts of melody on 'WeHateFredPhelps.com'. And that's just the first three tracks.
And finally the bands consistently great rhythm section hits the spotlight. Elliot Babin was buried in the production of
Parting... so much that even his dramatic fills didn't garner attention. By contrast, his methodical yet spontaneous performance on
Is Survived By... seemed almost like it was holding the whole thing together. Here he treads middle ground, impressing but never overbearing. Thanks to him 'Broken Records' sounds like anything but, and even during a fairly mediocre couple of tracks around halfway through he demands attention. Tyler Kirby has less luck in this department, never really dipping below audibility but not seizing opportunities to fill boring gaps with his stomach-churning grit like he does on 'Huckleberry' often enough.
Although it needs not be said that Touche are a very dark band with a lot of dark secrets to tell, I must stress that this is by far their most bleak, hateful output. If i didn't know any better, I'd say they'd blown all their artistic ambition in a mere 15 minutes. This is the sound of a band that could have taken over the world, and to see them compromise this spiteful, vicious approach to, well, everything, is hugely disheartening.
Like all of their releases,
Touche Amore is a brief listen. As an EP, it stands much shorter than their other (already extremely brief) records but condenses so much passion into that time that it's no wonder they so often get lumped in with La Dispute, a similarly emotionally draining band. Both are experts at crafting pictures of suffering in relatable fashion, and despite the odd dodgy lyrical moment neither can do any wrong when they apply this ethos to their music. Time hasn't been good to either band, but back in the late 2000's things were looking up for both 'wave' bands, and this and
Vancouver are testament to this.
