Touché Amoré
Stage Four

I'm heartsick.

Traveling thousands of kilometers on asphalt across endless expanses leading to unknown cities, each with its own story to tell, must be every kid's dream who wants to have a band. A reality that takes you to names scattered on a map without a precise order, randomly, with a life to live day by day, chasing what there is to gather in every little corner of the world visited. It can happen that in 2014 your van takes you for Halloween along the roads of Gainesville in Florida where you perform with your group in a show where you can express yourself completely, in an emotional rollercoaster that knows no end. It can happen that your world is about to collapse, you feel it inside yourself. It can happen that before getting on that stage your friends inform you of having received a phone call with the Californian prefix. You know it, it has happened. However you decide to take a break from everything. Isolate yourself and process that probable news you never wanted to hear there, on the paved streets of Gainesville. You decide that this concert hour will be your liberation, before everything collapses. Sweaty and tired, you know the greatest pain is yet to come. Jeremy, the friends say, your mother died an hour ago, while you were on stage living your dream. Jeremy is Jeremy Bolm, the singer of Touché Amoré. Stage Four is the fourth chapter of the band from Los Angeles. Stage Four is the terminal stage of cancer. Stage Four is Jeremy's dedication to his mother, Sandy.

Like a wave, like a rapture. Something you love is gone.

Stage Four thus becomes a testament in the melodic hues typical of Touché Amoré's post-hardcore. It's a sincere and blood-spattered album, where the band's soul inexorably passes through Bolm's broken vocal cords. It's a journey into the personal hell of the Burbank singer, capable of finding that necessary clarity to construct a vivid and emotional testimony of what he has gone through in recent years of his life. The artwork made by the London artist Anthony Gerace is the summary of a memorial rich with blurred and fragmented memories. An internal fracture where one seeks comfort and logic, even if it means losing oneself in the inevitable void left by a parent's death. Desperation finds its soulmate in the fragility of Bolm's mind, who struggles to find himself when looking in the mirror. It's a contradiction that emerges in "Water Damage" and runs along the backbone of Stage Four. Death leads to an inevitable personal maturity. However, in this case, one can also speak of the artistic maturity of Touché Amoré, who, having moved from Deathwish to Epitaph, complete the metamorphosis started on "Is Survived By" and create melancholic atmospheres ideal for cradling Bolm's introspective monologues. Stage Four is dominated by the sense of urgency and the harmonious intertwining of Nick Steinhardt's and Clayton Stevens' guitars in unprecedented symbiosis. The support of Elliott Babin and Tyler Kirby, on the other hand, is of those that shake the spirits and restore strength and vigor to Jeremy's feeble words or, on occasion, envelops him in intimacy.

You died at 69 with the body full of cancer.

Bolm is raw and straightforward in his drama. The ghosts of the five years spent beside his mother take shape again, along with the regrets of not having had the courage to find the right words during her last weeks of life. Many doubts animate Bolm's psyche, even as he wonders about the meaning of having faith or when after a car accident he emerges unscathed. Are you protecting me, mom? To bring the mother back to life it's time to close his eyes and remember his entire childhood and the most beautiful moments spent together. To wonder what brought the mother to the West Coast, narrate anecdotes from life in Glendale and Norfolk up to the story of one last trip to New York.
The lights of the skyscrapers of a bustling metropolis where many destinies intersect and clash in a transient flow are the ideal background to symbolize the ephemerality of every single moment we spend in life. It's the right stage for the baritone crossing of Bolm and the delicate voice of Julien Baker that sing the final awareness: you live there under the lights. Jeremy's friends paint a dreamy plot that explodes under the sweetly exasperated crescendo. In Stage Four, the pieces of the mosaic composed by Touché Amoré each find their own dimension and space. At the album's closure, there's also that last piece of the mosaic that kept Jeremy from sleeping in "Flowers And You": a voicemail left by his mother on his cellphone. Never listened to. For months. Then finally Jeremy finds the courage and lets us all hear it. It's nothing flashy, it's simply a recording where Sandy informs him that she'll stop by CVS to pick up some medicine. The end. An open wound to slowly heal: Jeremy knows this. And he's doing it:

May the Lord, mighty God, bless and keep you forever. Grant you peace, perfect peace, courage in every endeavor.