More than just distilling their approach, Robinson allows the band to go ever so slightly beyond what they’ve already proven themselves to be capable of. To capture the intensity of their bracingly melodic post-hardcore, they enlisted famed heavy metal producer Ross Robinson, who essentially helped birth the nu-metal sound by producing Korn’s self-titled 1994 debut, and later worked with the likes of Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, and At the Drive-In. Touché Amoré manage to counteract some of that lyrical ambiguity by delivering their most accessible collection of songs yet, one that feels like a natural culmination of what the band have been honing for more than a decade now.
“Even with this silence/ My voice can be misheard,” he sings on the spare ‘A Broadcast’. On ‘Exit Row’, he exposes the problem of trying to excavate meaning for a song as he howls, “I dragged my body to the desert’s end/ To mine for words in this abandoned head/ But all the vultures that surrounded said, Was ‘flesh is flesh whether live or dead’.” As Lament circles around the vaguest expressions of exhaustion, emptiness, and despondency, you can sense that Bolm isn’t uncomfortable with being real, but with the kind of response it might get. If all those pretences are false, then what should he be? “You’d think by now I’d know my place/ But I lose it almost every day/ You’d think by now I’d have a grip/ But again I’ve let it slip,” he confesses on the title track. ‘Deflector’ is the penultimate track on Lament, and it brings new light to the album’s thematic progression. Though his delivery is always impassioned, he stretches his voice as far as he possibly can on the chorus: “I’ll test the water/ I won’t dive right in/ That’s too personal/ I’m too delicate.” On the following track, ‘Deflector’, he places the blame on himself for posing as “a sideline voyeur, a conscientious deflector,” “a faulty poet,” and “a personal arsonist”. Bolm has explored the implications of Touché Amoré’s music being associated with emotional catharsis in the past, most prominently on 2013’s Is Survived By, but on ‘I’ll Be Your Host’, he sounds not just conflicted, but fed up: “I don’t want this role, I give it up,” he declares. ‘Reminders’ stands out because it has a clear purpose, something Bolm struggles to find throughout Lament (after all, he realizes on ‘Exit Row’, “Suffering has no purpose.”) The album is ultimately less about the grieving process than grappling with his own self-prescribed role as a conduit for grief and where that leads him. On any other album, ‘Reminders’ could have acted as the uproarious sing-along closer, but here, it feels more like a passing thought, a necessary distraction – one that, as Bolm has revealed, was almost scrapped from the record. But the track, written around the time of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, doesn’t deal with personal loss as much it taps into shared feelings of uncertainty arising from today’s fraught political climate. How could Lament possibly be anything but an affirmation of growth?īolm’s statement on the video seemed to confirm that narrative: “If we can provide even just three minutes of joy to someone right now that’s enough for us, and who doesn’t love seeing awesome people and their pets?” That song, simply called ‘Reminders’, is one of the most straightforward and anthemic songs Touché Amoré have ever recorded, and even features vocals from none other than Julien Baker. And in the lead-up to its release, it seemed like that’s where the project was heading: when fans were treated to an adorable music video featuring members of My Chemical Romance, Rise Against, Slipknot, Jimmy Eat World, and more playing with their pets, one could easily replace the need portion of the song’s “I need reminders of the love I have” refrain to have. Four years after Stage Four, a gut-wrenchingly powerful record detailing the passing of vocalist Jeremy Bolm’s mother from cancer while he was “on stage living the dream”, it’d be natural to expect its follow-up to be about the journey of finding some inkling of hope in the midst all the pain and grief.
post-hardcore outift Touché Amoré, are supposed to serve a purpose. Albums like Lament, the fifth outing from L.A.
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