![]() ![]() He finally called back and found out that his mother, Sandy, had passed away following a long battle with cancer back in California. He tried to snuff out the possibility of his mother passing until he could no longer bear living in a twisted version of Schrödinger’s cat. Singer/Lyricist Jeremy Bolm received a message from the hospital asking him to call them back. Two years ago on Halloween, Touché Amoré was performing an annual punk/hardcore festival in Gainesville, Florida. ‘Stage Four’ is a shining testament of post-hardcore’s ability to combine heavy guitars, breakneck tempos, and harsh vocals with melodicism, heartbreak, and absolute empathy. A common complaint for post-hardcore bands is that they get too “soft” the deeper they get into their discography, but I think that’s unfair – they’re just discovering what they really wanted to channel: empathy. ![]() Listening to these bands felt like a baptism by fire, an all-out assault that tapped into anger on the surface, but, it turns out, something much more complex was going on unnoticed by me. I didn’t like myself much when I was a teenager, and I respected these bands that expressed themselves so viscerally, so unabashedly. I drifted into post-hardcore because it spoke to some basic aspect of my being – a past version that was angry with the world and felt like an outcast. They were a part of your world. I started listening to Touché Amoré around the time they released their breakthrough album Is Survived By, an album that I never thought they would top. Someone is gone, and the impact on this planet won’t be soon forgotten. “ You left a hole in this earth,” Jeremy Bolm sings on “Benediction” – a track on their new album, ‘ Stage Four‘ – and it’s hard not to feel like he’s not just speaking literally. There’s something to be said about the wound your first loss leaves on your heart…it never quite heals, and it gets reopened every so often: when I visit her house, when I eat a raisin cookie, when I see apples growing on trees, when I take a little bar of hotel soap, and when I see my mother do her nightly prayer. ![]() She was my first true loss in this life, and she won’t be my last. She was the type of woman that complained about the lack of sandwiches served at her hospital rather than the fact that she was in a hospital herself. She wasn’t perfect, she held wicked grudges and was as passive aggressive as they come, but she never stopped loving you. My grandmother had a steadfast heart she loved everyone without fail. I still can’t believe it’s been over a year. My grandmother, Elayne, passed away on September 3rd, 2015. She died of breast cancer. Everywhere and Nowhere On Touché Amoré and the power of loss ![]()
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