Touché Amoré has always occupied a central slice of a genre Venn diagram (at least, a personally constructed one). One circle represents screamo’s sporadic outbursts, another the deconstructed scrappiness of post-hardcore, and another on-point poetic vignettes as if ripped from a book. Needless to say, lyricist and frontman Jeremy Bolm has written one of those and is as much a product of hardcore culture as much as he is an orchestrator of its future (check out his Secret Voice label’s Balladeer’s Redefined). Alongside long running bandmates Clayton Stevens, Nick Steinhardt, Elliot Babin and Tyler Kirby, their scene-gathering sounds feel both all-encompassing and alien altogether, a through-line that still extends to their sixth album Spiral In A Straight Line.
Clearly, it’s beaten these visions of skewed geometry into my brain, true to the record’s name. Shapes are not what we perceive them to be, people fall out, connect and reconnect, life’s path doesn’t go exactly where we expect it to. But that’s ok. It’s the sort of connective imagery that Bolm has achieved so well through TA’s history, placing him as a podium-contender for most heart-wrenching lyrics going (not mean feat for post-hardcore and emo acts). In similar fashion, Nobody’s tries to understand if we can play a part in the passage of time set out as a series of unexpected curves: “Is it enough / To call it off / And lick our wounds and put us into past tense?”, displaying the singer’s wearied strain that can only come about through nearly two-decades of touring in support of the band’s crowd-calling nature.
On Hal Ashby, there’s this continued sense of needing to change perspective for the better—“I’ll takе some time, recalibratе / I’ll try anything, anything / If it’ll course correct me”—and the difficulty to do so gets wrestled with throughout. The so-called Force Of Habit “takes patience to break”, which almost playfully expresses how the band’s musical ideas have changed over time, too. Since their breakthrough Stage Four, their sound has revolved steadily more around central riff ideas, rather than sticking many parts together in two-minute bursts (albeit even these never seemed ‘crunched’ so much as folded like a velvet omelette). Force Of Habit likewise takes an echoey morose tone to anchor the whole song, an motif mirrored on Subversion (Brand New Love). Then again, this also flits between picked-through chords and a wonderfully warbled lead line straight from Stevens’ and Steinhardt’s most memorable lick repository recalling the Is Survived By days.
The old and new TA flavours abound throughout Spiral In A Straight Line to great effect. Disasters showcases their original punk side, driven masterfully by Ross Robinson’s production job of layered acoustic heavy-string hitting under speedy panic-inducing chordal sequences, and by the intense pounding of Babin’s drumkit. His blastbeats pop up sparsely and almost unexpectedly through their discography, portraying Mezzanine as a hardcore ripper before an unusual slack-rocker outro (interestingly preceding the later involvement of Dinosaur Jr’s Lou Barlow). Speaking of indie-tinge, it’s not often we get to hear Julien Baker and blastbeats in the same sentence let alone in the same song (Goodbye for Now), albeit she’s a regular TA collaborator whose soaring voice is the perfect foil to Bolm’s exasperation. Altitude, with its treacle-thick riffs, has a noir style that ups the intensity not through screams or walls of noise but an eerie choir passage.
Even after handling heady themes of grieving, and the tricky distance between tour cities and home, not so much before have these been matched by the noticeably moody textures overlapping across this record. While a mostly glossy post-hardcore shimmer has marked Touché Amoré’s signature, the band’s path to present a concise and more darkly reflective tale shows a distinguished growth soundwise. More importantly, it solidifies their most effective form: storytellers of universal feelings, which we can all take relatable pieces of to heart.
For fans of: Defeater, Pianos Become The Teeth, La Dispute
‘Spiral In A Straight Line’ by Touché Amoré is released on 11th October on Rise Records.
Words by Elliot Burr
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