TOUCHE AMORE GENRE FREE
Drummer Elliott Babin’s jerky rhythm in the verses – moving from insistent snare hits to a thudding sequence on the toms – builds expertly to the group vocals in the chorus, where Bolm pines for “a way to feel free / without being someone else”. The simple power chords of the main riff contrast with the clean, math rock-esque guitar part on the bridge. But its small touches make it a resonant, chant-along ready tune that’s likely to become a future concert favorite. Structurally, it doesn’t seem that different from any other emo anthem from the past two decades: it utilizes a basic verse/chorus structure and hangs on a catchy chorus. To see this in action, one need only listen to Lament‘s highlight and an instant classic for the group, “Reminders”. The closing lines of “Limelight” fit just about any time of major transition: “So let’s embrace the twilight / While burning out the limelight.” What makes Touché Amoré so compelling as a band is how well they speak to the present, while at the same time sticking to the sound they’ve been refining since …To the Beat of the Dead Horse. Yet, for the most part, Bolm’s lyrics trend toward the universal, expressing anguishes and woes that know all years and seasons. “I’ve lost more family members / Not to cancer, but the GOP / What’s the difference I’m not for certain / They all end up dead to me.” Bolm explicitly addresses the political climate in the United States on the piano-led closer “A Forecast”, taking time after announcing he’s “found the patience for jazz” to memorialize his dead. However well its instrumental quality and emotional tenor match our current moment, Lament is certainly not a “COVID album”, or an artwork which should have foisted upon it the expectation to sum up an unfortunate year. It’s undeniably groan-inducing that so many pieces of writing you will read this year, including this one, give space – even when it’s not necessary – to address, as the saying goes, “these unprecedented times”. An album called Lament, which features someone screaming on every track, feels appropriate if on-the-nose. But Lament‘s release comes near the end of 2020.
Sure, this aesthetic sounds increasingly dated – gone are the years where bands like Thursday could regularly place high on the Billboard charts. This harsh/clean aural contrast is the bread and butter of many subgenres of metal and hard rock, and Touché Amoré have across four studio records (plus 2019’s Dead Horse X, a “re-recording” of their 2009 debut …To the Beat of a Dead Horse) proven themselves to be excellent practitioners of the style.
(Check these eternizing lines from “Non Fiction” from 2013’s Is Survived By: “With time we’ll all be gone / But how you lived can live on.”) The dual guitar threat of Clayton Stevens and Nick Steinhardt puts Touché Amoré several cuts above their screamo contemporaries, with both contrasting high-tempo riffs with clear, delicately picked guitar parts. Vocalist and lyricist Jeremy Bolm writes the kind of quotable missives that one can easily imagine an angsty teen keeping close to their heart. The Los Angeles band’s approach to post-hardcore feels very mid-to-late 2000s when screamo achieved its greatest commercial success. Genre aside, Touché Amoré‘s fifth studio album, Lament, couldn’t be better timed.
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