TOUCHÉ AMORÉ is an incredibly important band to me.
As I exited my teens and entered my 20s, Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me found me in a state of tumult. Music and its attendant social space had become part of my identity in an inexorable way, but I was finding myself suddenly at odds with people in my local scene for ethical reasons. People I had partied with, people I’d spent time in cars talking for hours about the music we shared an interest in, were suddenly untrustworthy at best and actively horrible people at worst. I was discovering that despite our surface-level shared interests, we were worlds apart.
And so listening to Jeremy Bolm scream “I’m PARTING the SEA, between BRIGHTNESS and ME” on Parting the Sea’s opening track “Tilde,” somehow captured the angst I was feeling at that exact moment and put into words the gulf I was attempting to straddle. Bolm’s lyrics are often intensely personal, glimpses into his own experiences or mindset, but so many of TA’s songs extend beyond the purview of the writer into almost universal feelings. The dual attack of “Praise/Love” and “Anyone/Anything” on Is Survived By… speaks to this so clearly, for me.
I saw TA at the OKC Conservatory in 2013 after finally leaving the local punk scene behind. I felt paranoid as I walked into the venue space, afraid I would see someone from the social fabric I had just cut away. I was relying on the fact that most of the people who I would’ve dreaded seeing at this show hated the kind of post-hardcore TA plays to shield me from their bullshit. Once the band started playing, all my petty fear washed away. I let Clayton Stevens’ guitar work submerge me in sound. I found myself screaming along with so many of the band’s songs. It felt cathartic. I left the show with a full heart for the first time in a while.
Years passed. My fervor for listening to new TA music diminished. At first I agreed with critics who wondered if the band was going soft. Stage Four is such an incredibly personal album, reckoning up-close with the death of Bolm’s mother just two years prior, but it was slower, less “hardcore” than the band’s previous output. I was dumb then; I get it now. I can’t stop myself from shedding a tear during the album opener, “Flowers and You.” I intimately feel the pain of the final moments of “Eight Seconds:” “I crossed southwest second street/ made the call and stared at my feet/ ‘She passed away about an hour ago/ while you were onstage living the dream.’” Lament (2020) was interpreted as a further softening, with the band continuing to experiment with more indie rockish and shoegazey sounds. It’s no coincidence that Lament features TA’s longest song, “Limelight,” a song which also boasts an appearance by MANCHESTER ORCHESTRA, clocking in at over 5 minutes. Lament is slower, more introspective, but also more hopeful – giving us an insight into Bolm’s mindset in the years following Stage Four and his mother’s death and the world that unfolded after 2016.
Spiral in a Straight Line, then, is the TA album where we get to fully understand the effect the pandemic had on the band. It’s also a chance to evaluate where TA is at as a band after 17 years. The alt-rock-tinged “Nobody’s” gives us a good glimpse: “We’re nobody’s now/ We’re nobody’s business/ Is it enough/ To call it off/ and lick our wounds and put us into past tense?” the band asks right off the bat. These themes of moving on, of looking forward, of no longer dwelling on the past and who and what we were then, are heavy throughout the album.
It would be wrong to assume that Spirals has fully embraced indie rock, though. “Disasters” features some of Bolm’s scratchiest screams over top of some of the band’s most urgent-sounding music in years. “Hal Ashby” is similarly quick-footed, sounding like it could’ve been an outtake from Is Survived By.
The album also gets deep into Bolm’s psyche at times. “Mezzanine” is a chaotic rejection of grief and depression over blastbeats. “Force of Habit” is a raw examination of how anxiety (and possibly certain behavioral disorders) has affected Bolm and the people around him: “I obsess and I can’t let go/ The insignificant or something I broke/ I can’t think straight or switch gears/ It plays out and affects the people I love.” This is followed by the screamed refrain: “It’s a force of habit/ It takes patience to break.”
Relationships of one sort or another are another big theme that shows up frequently on Spirals, namely on songs like “This Routine,” “Subversion (Brand New Love)” and “The Glue,” where Bolm laments that it might be time to move on: “I’ve done what I can to be the glue/ There’s no longer a connection, just residue/ We started strong but I’m not you/ Ten years gone, I couldn’t see it through.” Everything ties together into the album’s closer, “Goodbye For Now,” where Bolm finally tells his interlocutor(s): “We say goodbye for now, to be free, no longer bound/ To journey out and see what else is out there to be found.”
Listening to Spirals makes me realize that my relationship to this music has changed dramatically. I no longer feel it as a live-wire connected directly to my heart. It’s in my head instead, latching itself to my own experiences, becoming the soundtrack to certain memories – some good, some I wish I could forget. It rocks wistfully, which is a strange way to describe a post-hardcore album of any stripe, but it’s the best way I can come up with to describe TA’s music: this is for people who want to mosh while yearning. Right now, maybe that describes me.