The band blends art rock into hardcore with a fluidity and ease that is the envy of their contemporaries. Drummer Eliot Babin is like the feral reincarnation of Keith Moon, bashing away at his kit with graceful disregard. Nick Steinhardt’s shimmering leads elicit scenes of palm trees and thundering waves, forming the perfect backdrop for Bolm’s lyrics. Tyler Kirby will echo Bolm’s lyrics or fill in spaces with his own powerful screams, adding to the notion that this approach seems almost closer to spoken word poetry than anything one might expect to find on a “screamo” record. Across the board, Touché Amoré are setting a standard not just for their genre, but for performers of all stripes.
The setlist featured songs from all four of the band’s full length albums, as well as cuts from their various splits with other bands. Though the narrative of Stage Four is powerful, none of the band’s prior material lost its own urgency, and often even added to Bolm’s latest message. New songs like “Eight Seconds,” telling of how Bolm was onstage performing with the group when he received news of his mother’s passing, are only made more powerful by tracks from 2011’s Parting The Sea Between Brightness and Me, like “Home Away from Here”, a song about the dark and light of touring, and “The Great Repetition”, which deals with the inherent struggle and cry for attention in performing. While Bolm may be defying odds by letting more and more of himself pour into TA’s music with each effort, his commitment, and that of his band mates, has been there all along. That is precisely what makes Touché Amoré such a special, and indispensable act.
The band ended their set with a moving encore, performing their slow burn, “Non Fiction,” from 2013’s …Is Survived By, and finishing the night with “Gravity, Metaphorically”. This last powerful song ends with a repeated incantation of lines like: “It was the first time in a long time that I felt alive. At least I tried.” By ignoring labels like “emo” and words like “revival,” Touché Amoré have managed to commit to making compelling, emotionally potent, and movingly honest music that challenges anyone within hearing distance to choose anything but life.
