![]() ![]() It’s not just entertainment, though it most certainly can (and should) be. ![]() ![]() I find myself comforted, listening in gentle communion, to a work of art that shares my grief brilliantly and empathetically. Bolm’s incredibly vulnerable declarations of hurt, loneliness, regret and suffering are absolutely necessary and equally wonderful. The lyrics are honest, passionate and absolutely heartbreaking. Their album, Stage Four, detailing Bolm’s grieving process after his mother died of the same terrible illness afflicting my father-in-law, lives on a loop in my mind and heart now. Jeremy Bolm and his band Touché Amoré have kept me good company lately as I’ve grappled with these questions under the red glow of cancer. How? Why? Does this eventually make sense? When does the adulthood that I always imagined existed as a child reveal itself and infuse me with all of the understanding, bravery and confidence in the world? Finally, sitting in a hospital room watching a disease hellbent on eliminating as wide a swath of humanity as possible lay waste to a man I respect, admire and love. Sitting on a train, praying for it to go faster than physics would allow while staring ahead blankly, not knowing how to help, how to support, how to logically assess the seriousness of the situation…how to cope. My wife crying on the phone, begging me to hurry. Leaving work early on a gorgeous Colorado Friday to rush to the hospital after he took a serious turn for the worse. The last few days have seemed to scream by in a high-functioning haze. I don’t know how to process this biological certainty. This joins Bring Me The Horizon’s Semperternalas one of my favorite albums of the year and I can’t wait to see them live in Portland on Halloween in a few weeks so stay tuned for that concert review as well.My father-in-law is a good and decent man. You don’t see nearly the development in lyrics and instrumentation that you do here with one notable exception being Comeback Kid who still remains one of my all time favorite hardcore bands for that very reason.Īll in all this is an utterly fantastic album and has entered heavy rotation on my phone. Tracks like “Just Exist”, “Is Survived By”, “Harbor”, “Non Fiction” and 8 other instances of awesomeness that show intellectual and emotional growth that, to be brutally honest, you just don’t see very often in a hardcore band. All of which you get with Is Survived By, but you also get so much more. It had powerful anthems like “~” and gut wrenching emotional tracks like “Face Ghost”. Their last album, Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, was fantastic in every sense of the word. I mean in it in the classic sense of intrigue, complexity, and depth. There is so much melody and drama in this album it makes me a bit giddy, and I don’t mean drama in the Bad Girls Club sense either. Which is why I say this is the best HARDCORE album of the year. Call me simple, but if it sounds like hardcore, feels like hardcore, and moshes like hardcore… it’s hardcore. It’s not like hardcore bands just stopped creating music, that on a specific day they packed up their mosh pits and went home and hardcore stopped existing. I know that music historians, record labels, and obsessive compulsive music geeks have a defined segment of time in American music where hardcore was at it’s peak and blah blah blah, but I feel like it’s a bullshit term. And no it is not a typo that I called them a hardcore band and not a post-hardcore band.įor the record I hate the term post-hardcore. Not only does this album have their longest song to date (3:30) and show immense growth / evolution from their last album, but I’m going to put my stake in the ground and call it the hardcore album of the year. Pardon me for being so blunt, but the new Touché Amoré is fucking awesome.
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