Album review: Touché Amoré – Spiral In A Straight Line

The trouble with writing a masterpiece is having to follow it up. Touché Amoré’s first three albums – 2009’s …To The Beat Of A Dead Horse, 2011’s Parting The Sea Between The Brightness And Me and 2013’s Is Survived By – were good. Very good, in fact. But in 2016, the Los Angeles band hit incredible new heights with Stage Four. It was an album born out of severe grief, inspired by the death of Jeremy Bolm’s mother from cancer, and the trauma and depression it induced in the frontman.

It remains an incredibly powerful tour de force, and one of the most profound and moving records about mortality ever made. Listening to it even today, it’s impossible not to hear how much its creation depleted Jeremy, but it’s precisely how that combined with the band’s pushing of the traditional post-hardcore template that made it a true magnum opus.

It took four years for 2020's Lament to follow, but it lacked the spark and harrowing passion of its predecessor. Ironically, for a band who had pushed boundaries so much, it felt slightly like them trying hard to recapture the tragic magic of its predecessor.

Another four years on from that, Touché have returned with Spiral In A Straight Line. It begins with the angst of Nobody’s, a song that balances melody and existential terror to a near-perfect degree, before the breathless rush of Disasters and its self-aware neurosis takes over. It’s an impressive start, and one that, thematically at least, is maintained with Hal Ashby – a nod to the Harold And Maude director, whose name is invoked as Jeremy navigates his own insecurities and self-doubt. But then, as the song progresses, it begins to sound like familiar ground, as does Force Of Habit. That’s not a bad thing per se, and it’s still better than what a lot of bands could manage, but it doesn’t reach the high bar that Touché set themselves years ago.

There are a couple of marvellous moments – namely the shapeshifting Mezzanine and the agonising regret of Finalist – but often Spiral In A Straight Line settles into itself too much. This Routine is Touché by numbers – again, not necessarily a bad thing, just not incredible – while Subversion (Brand New Love), which features Dinosaur Jr. legend Lou Barlow, starts off promisingly but suffers from the two sets of vocals jarring with each other.

Album finale Goodbye For Now features Julien Baker, who’s also appeared on the band’s last two records. When her vocals kick in, the track finds its true and phenomenal force, but even though the song’s final moments make for a remarkable crescendo, it’s more an indication of what this album could have been. But then, that’s the trouble with writing a masterpiece – everything will forever be compared to it.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Thursday, Fiddlehead, Casey

Spiral In A Straight Line is out now via Rise