There’s that line about avoiding the voicemail, or the one about needing to skip track two every time he listens to Benji because it hits too close to home. The concrete details in Stage Four are what sticks with me. He commits, interrogating himself and his own guilt and shame, delivering an absolutely bruising and cathartic document of what it’s like to live with loss and grief. And you’d have to be pretty fucking heartless to call Stage Four “too serious.” It’s a subject that demands utmost seriousness.
That sound - wounded emotional aggression - is nothing new in underground music, but I’m not sure I’ve heard a band that’s had it so innately mastered since early Thursday. The guitars will build a bit of Explosions In The Sky-style melodic majesty before they’ll bring it all crashing down, and then they’ll do it again and again. Behind him, the California band works up a grand clangor. He sprinkled 2011’s Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me, which had been Touché Amoré’s best album up until now, with intense, teeth-gritted spoken-word passages. Bolm uses his as an instrument of weakness, describing his own doubts and fears. In the past, when other singers have used that delivery, they’ve used it to convey toughness or togetherness or brotherhood. Bolm sings in a stragulated yelp-roar, a full-throated cookie-monster wail. Touché Amoré aren’t quite a hardcore band, but they aren’t quite a post-hardcore band, either.
Touché Amoré have made a whole lot of great music in just under a decade of existence, but if there’s been a knock on them that whole time, it’s been that they’ve always been so fucking serious. And maybe that’s why it resonates the way it does, why I have to take a few seconds to hear myself breathe after Stage Four ends. It’s just a simple mundane thing about picking up a prescription from CVS. It’s not some heartfelt burst of emotion, some piece of sage advice. It’s not what we want to hear from a message that comes from beyond the grave. As “ Skyscraper,” the album’s last song, fades out, we hear that message. It’s not a huge leap to imagine yourself keeping that last message stored on your phone, unheard, constantly stressing that you’re going to drop your phone in a puddle and that message is going to remain unheard forever. The one line, about the message, is devastating in part because it’s so simple and identifiable. She’s the “you.” The whole album is about her, and about Bolm’s reactions to her death, and a pretty huge chunk of it is sung directly to her. He’s singing to his mother, who died of cancer in 2014.
“I haven’t found the courage to listen to your last message to me.” That’s Touché Amoré frontman Jeremy Bolm, partway through his band’s new album, Stage Four.
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