Touche Amore: Stage Four ALBUM REVIEW

Death is a hard thing to deal with. It not only leaves a hole in the lives of the people who knew the deceased, but it also causes the people closest to the departed to not only realize their own mortality, but also brings the idea of an afterlife to the forefront of the mind. This is the conflicted and chaotic world that lead singer Jeremy Bolm found himself in after Halloween of 2014, the night he lost his mother Sandy to stage four cancer.

This is Touche Amore's fourth full length album, and it is their best for sure. Musically, it is their sharpest, with a lot of great guitar leads and big, gorgeous choruses such as on the opener "Flowers and You" and the fantastic "Water Damage". This is the same band that came together with the fantastic, Is Survived By in 2013, only now they are even more focused and are now operating in peak conditions. But I have to be honest and say that this album on a musical level is simply overshadowed by how intense and awe-inspiring the lyrics are.

I'm going to get my two main gripes out of the way now, so I can spend the rest of this review properly praising the finest vocal performance I've heard all year. One, the clean vocals on here are too low in the mix, and while I wasn't too hot on the almost spoken word vocals of the track "Benediction" they have grown on me. Two, some of the instrumentals run together, especially on the shorter tracks, although it's not too much of a problem, because that just means your full attention will be on the vocals.

Now for what is easily the best part of this LP, and what could possibly be my favorite vocal performance of the year, Jeremy Bolm. In short, this is the kind of album that is so good, but is also incredibly hard to listen to, because it just has such heavy subject matter, and Jeremy's lyrics are so incredibly sad. But at the same time, this album sees him going through his emotions in a cathartic way, by screaming at the top of his lungs, and putting his pain to song, something that he and the rest of Touche Amore have been doing for a while now, but Stage Four describes such a fresh pain, and you can feel it in every note and every heartbreaking lyric. I don't want to go into too much detail or quote any of the lines here (I would have to post them all to do this LP justice), because I don't want to rob anyone of the experience of listening to this album deeply, paying attention to every word closely; it is quite an emotional journey, one well worth taking.

This is some heavy stuff, but the arc that this album goes through is one of this years finest musical moments, and it has confirmed this album a spot on my end of the year list for sure.

9.2/10