Touché Amoré – “Stage Four”

Touché Amoré have been a staple of the Los Angeles post-hardcore/screamo scene for quite some time now. Their confessional and deeply personal lyrics, coupled with a welcoming clean guitar sound and a hard-hitting rhythm section has set them leagues apart from many of their contemporaries, and earned them a reputation as one of punk’s best modern acts.

“Stage Four,” their fourth LP and first on Epitaph, displays the group’s refined indie-rock sensibility delivered along with their more aggressive d-beats and throat-shredding vocals. It also marks Touché Amoré’s first use of clean vocals as well as screaming, and it works. Vocalist Jeremy Bolm has improved not just in terms of vocal technique, but in terms of songwriting as well, yielding some of the band’s most complex and emotional songs yet. The majority of these tracks reflect on the loss of Bolm’s grandmother, and the accompanying guilt and frustration that have since plagued him.

A fine example of this is lead single “Palm Dreams,” a song about Bolm’s yearning to discover his mother’s reasons for moving to the western United States. The song makes it apparent from the very first notes; this is the best Touché Amoré has ever sounded. The guitars swell and meander about the driving drums, as Bolm sings in a clean voice that compliments his screams as much as it does the instruments.

Although songs such as “Displacement,” (whose title is a subtle nod to the d-beat genre), are classic aggressive post-hardcore, this doesn’t mean the band has abandoned their sense of atmosphere. Throughout the album, especially on “Rapture” and “Skyscraper” (the latter of which features singer-songwriter Julien Baker), a refined and beautiful post-rock and indie influence bleeds through the angrier walls of sound, delivering what can only be described as a completely cathartic and emotional listening experience.

For Fans of: Defeater, Explosions in the Sky, older Pianos Become the Teeth, indie-screamo