On Water Damage, Bolm discusses a set of four coffee cups that becomes three when the medication causes his mother’s hands to shake and drop one of them. The honest way in which these subjects are addressed pulls you in, allowing you to question them yourself. In doing this, he grapples with the knowledge of her faith, and his lack thereof, what it means to pick up the pieces after such a loss, and how it affects life moving forward. He wastes no time wallowing in sadness but essentially asks the existential questions that loss brings. The way in which he addresses this is something to be admired. The album serves as his search for understanding his relationship and what it means to carry her memory. The inclusion of this message at the end provides some sense of closure to the heavy themes hanging over the album, while the rest sees Bolm working to make sense of things before ultimately arriving at this point. A voicemail you can easily see yourself saving on your own phone. It's the type of ordinary that resonates due to its simplicity. It's nothing profound or life shattering, just a simple message about dropping off prescriptions. On New Halloween he laments, "I haven't found the courage to listen to your last message to me." After the final note rings out on album closer, Skyscraper, we get to hear this message. It's a brutally honest look at what it means to lose someone, made all the more intimate by the majority of the lyrics being written in first person, directly addressing his late mother. This provides the perfect backdrop for Bolm's search for meaning in tragedy.Īs hinted at in the title, Stage Four revolves around frontman Jeremy Bolm's relationship with his mother during her final days battling cancer and his subsequent coming to terms with her loss. Behind him, the band is more focused than ever, expanding their sound with an emphasis on cleaner guitar tones, bigger sounding drums, and moving song structures. He doesn't beat you over the head with obtuse metaphor, but instead lets you experience his personal journey through simple confessional style reflection.
On the album, vocalist Jeremy Bolm takes the listener through all of this with an honesty that draws you in with his elegant, yet straightforward lyricism. Above all, it’s a deeply human album that draws meaning from the mundane moments and links them to the existential, while also tackling the grieving process head on.
It's the kind of record that makes you want to hold those close to you just a little tighter. Touché Amorè's Stage Four is a crushingly beautiful meditation on grief and loss. Review Summary: Touché Amorè's Stage Four is a crushingly beautiful meditation on grief and loss.
0 kommentar(er)
