Album Of The Week: Torche Harmonicraft

The underground metal landscape is a rocky and striated one, full of sub-sections and micro-scenes, so it's hard to make any sweeping generalizations about it. But here's one: Over the last 20 years or so, underground metal as a whole has become less and less hospitable to any concept of metal, which makes the Miami band Torche a total outlier. Among their scuzz-rocking peers, Torche are the rare band willing to release an EP of Guided By Voices covers, or to claim Superchunk as influences. Their 2008 album Meanderthal is beloved in extreme-metal circles, and it's a weird one. It's an experimental album, but the experiments don't have anything to do with whiplash time-changes or from-the-gut roars. Those things are there, but they're expected. What sets Meanderthal apart, its true radical qualities, are its big, gummy meat-and-potatoes '90s indie-heartland melodies and hooks. And for Harmonicraft, their first proper album since, Torche are pounding that idea of melody even harder, doing their best to show us a parallel universe where bands still wrote big, loud, catchy songs that could conceivably pack arenas. It's the album that Foo Fighters might make if Foo Fighters were still remotely capable of making a great album.