Review Summary: There goes Touche Amore, bringing the windmills again
As far as hardcore albums go,
Parting the Sea Between Brightness And Me doesn’t pull any stops. In the vein of their contemporaries, its still hardcore with some metallic riffs and vague emo influence thrown in. You’ll hear the same driving riffs punctuated by pretty interludes you’d expect from a band that plays with acts like La Dispute and Comadre, and the same vocal intensity to boot. This is the type of band made for a live show, and the energy they give off throughout the album shows it well.
The opening trio of songs are undoubtedly the strongest section of the album, as through the opening cries of the album title in “~“ to the early era Blacklisted inspired “Pathfinder“, into the epic “The Great Repitition” you get to see all the variables of Touche Amore that really work, in particular “The Great Repitition“. A song that is undeniably visceral but still well constructed, Touche Amore take all of the punch of a five minute post-hardcore song and wrap it all up in under two.
Thing is, is that necessarily a good thing? The rest of the album suffers from an identity crisis, being that all 20 or so minutes of the album never really get distinguished. The same novelty behind a 5 minute song being condensed to two minutes also makes everything feel sort of homogenous. Where its cool and dynamic at first, by the time the albums over you get the sense that there was too much, too quickly, and something was certainly lost. While it may break away from the hardcore realm, giving these songs more room to grow and expand would have greatly increased the replayability of
Parting the Sea beyond the first listen or two.
Then again, its still a great record. You can still point out the disconnect of the lyrics (routinely awful, but no worse than any of their peers), but the total package makes sense. The album also finishes strongly with “Amends”, a song that owes more than a little to the ‘post-screamo’ crowd. Touche Amore once again prove that they can make a damn good hardcore album, but the potential for them to make something better oozes throughout the record and continues to hold them back.
