The entirety of their relationship is mapped out, from the life-affirming beginning, a chance meeting full of hope and possibility on ‘Tintin in Tibet’, to the failure to grasp out to any sense of his wife in the album’s final lines (“With arms reached and run my fingers through the air / Where you breathed, touching your last breath / Reaching through to the world of the gone with my hand empty”). I’ve never been to this home, met his wife, or been in Elverum’s position, but I feel like I know it all. It’s the house he continues to share with his young daughter, whose amorphous childhood grief he describes so painfully on this song. The family home he shared with his wife Geneviève before her passing from pancreatic cancer. You can hear the house breathing in ‘A Crow, Pt. I press play again, to make sure I have it right. Still, the rawness of it – in its cracks, its wavering pitch and howling moans – something about it makes you avert your eyes, even when you’re wrapped up in the story. He rarely raises his voice above a whisper.
It’s a masterpiece, my first 10/10, which shouldn’t be a big deal, but vanity and all that. But the review is already finished and I know how I feel.
I’m reviewing the project for Loud And Quiet and so I had no choice, I tell myself. My laptop keeps reminding me that I’m up soon, but it feels wrong to cut the album short. I’ve been a mess for the past half an hour. Enveloping, sour, intimate and finger-picked, like much of the album. The final elegy from ‘Now Only’, Phil Elverum’s latest album as Mount Eerie, is in its opening guitar notes. Slouched up, hair matted, sinking into a hoody beneath my duvet. At three in the morning, I’m sobbing while ‘Crow, Pt. Touche Amore once again prove that they can make a damn good hardcore album, but the potential for them to make something better oozes throughout the record and continues to hold them back.I think about my dad’s death all the time, but I haven’t cried about it in years, so long that I can’t name when or where. The album also finishes strongly with “Amends”, a song that owes more than a little to the ‘post-screamo’ crowd. You can still point out the disconnect of the lyrics (routinely awful, but no worse than any of their peers), but the total package makes sense. While it may break away from the hardcore realm, giving these songs more room to grow and expand would have greatly increased the replayability of Parting the Sea beyond the first listen or two. Where its cool and dynamic at first, by the time the albums over you get the sense that there was too much, too quickly, and something was certainly lost. The same novelty behind a 5 minute song being condensed to two minutes also makes everything feel sort of homogenous. Thing is, is that necessarily a good thing? The rest of the album suffers from an identity crisis, being that all 20 or so minutes of the album never really get distinguished. A song that is undeniably visceral but still well constructed, Touche Amore take all of the punch of a five minute post-hardcore song and wrap it all up in under two. The opening trio of songs are undoubtedly the strongest section of the album, as through the opening cries of the album title in “~“ to the early era Blacklisted inspired “Pathfinder“, into the epic “The Great Repitition” you get to see all the variables of Touche Amore that really work, in particular “The Great Repitition“. This is the type of band made for a live show, and the energy they give off throughout the album shows it well. You’ll hear the same driving riffs punctuated by pretty interludes you’d expect from a band that plays with acts like La Dispute and Comadre, and the same vocal intensity to boot. In the vein of their contemporaries, its still hardcore with some metallic riffs and vague emo influence thrown in. Review Summary: There goes Touche Amore, bringing the windmills againĪs far as hardcore albums go, Parting the Sea Between Brightness And Me doesn’t pull any stops.
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