Friday Full-Length: Torche, In Return
I’m not saying the heavy underground took Torche for granted, but yes, in fact that’s very much what I’m saying. The Miami-based innovators of what for a time was called sludge-pop called it quits in 2022, when founding frontman Steve Brooks announced he was leaving the band just a few nights before they featured at Desertfest New York (review here) and began a Fall tour alongside Meshuggah. No one would accuse the band, founded in 2004 and with five full-lengths to their credit — the last of them being 2019’s Admission (review here) — of owing anybody anything, but it was still a bummer to see them disband. Their 2005 self-titled debut (discussed here) had taken the bomb-toned emo-punk leanings of Brooks‘ prior band, Floor, and crafted a worthy successor to that band’s landmark 2002 self-titled LP (discussed here), pushing into a new kind of heavy rock that was as dense as any colossally-riffed nodding doom, but uptempo, major key, and with a shove that would become a signature.
Comprised then of Brooks, guitarist Juan Montoya, drummer Rick Smith and bassist Jon Nuñez — the band’s final lineup would see Nuñez on guitar in place of Montoya and Eric Hernandez on bass — Torche issued the In Return EP as a combined 10″ and CD with a rare non-booby-lady cover by John Dyer Baizley of Baroness, pressed through Robotic Empire in 2007, between the self-titled and their 2008 Hydra Head-backed breakout, Meanderthal. It’s a blip in their career arc, but at just 19 minutes and seven songs, it serves the immediacy of what Torche did in a way that a full album never could. That’s not to say their records were too long — the self-titled was 29 minutes, Meanderthal still just 36; they never went over 40 — but that the EP format was suited to the rush of a piece like In Return‘s title-track, a two-and-a-half-minute burst of solar-matter-made-riff that feels like it should fall apart before its first verse but that holds itself together right into its midsection stops and shifts into a stoner-metal nod with Brooks‘ always clean vocals over top. Torche songs never wanted for having a lot going on. On In Return, that could be true without their being more overwhelming than they wanted.
In Return highlights what works in Torche‘s sound in a way that their albums couldn’t, and it wasn’t the only EP they put out during their time that did so — 2010’s Songs for Singles (review here) had enough substance to carry the band from Meanderthal to 2012’s Harmonicraft (review here) with little dip in momentum; certainly a full touring schedule helped in that regard as well — but is a special moment just the same, and not only because it features at its penultimate moment one of the heaviest and most righteously dug-in tracks Torche would ever produce in the outright-monstrous “Tarpit Carnivore.” Amid a riff in the imitable low tone that few but Brooks could hope to conjure, simple lyrics like “Sabretooth mastodon/Dire wolf/Native American” feel duly primal in a way that presages the coming of a next generation of heavy purveyors; these are lessons bands like Conan would pick up and use as a foundation to embark in new, sometimes much more outwardly ferocious directions.
But In Return is no more only about “Tarpit Carnivore” than it is any of its other six component cuts — well, maybe a little; they do revel in it and build up to the track’s arrival with the angular procession in the two-minute instrumental “Olympus Mons,” named for the Martian volcano that, to-date, is the largest discovered in the solar system. Even so, that movement from one to the other is just part of an overarching flow that begins with the suitably cannon-esque shots of distortion and crash fired at the outset of “Warship” and continues in the declarative stomp that emerges from the title-track. As tightly packed as the songs seem to be in themselves, they in conversation with each other as well, whether it’s “In Return” fading into the explosion of light at the start of “Bring Me Home” — ahead of the curve on heavygaze by more than half a decade, with its resonant vocal melody and airy guitar — and the flurried intensity of “Rule the Beast,” which follows with a gallop that rivals what High on Fire might’ve produced at the time while remaining very much its own thing, and fun as part of that in a way many of their peers couldn’t be. As much ‘worship’ pervades the heavy underground, whether it’s volume, tone, riff, weed, or whatever as the object of it, Torche were one of few bands who could actually cast a song as a celebration.
To wit, the EP follows the great flattening of “Tarpit Carnivore,” Torche further the onslaught in “Hellion,” the closer and longest track at a whopping 3:37. Smith‘s toms take a beating as thrown-down-the-stairs fills pepper the chorus, and that hook is anchored by heft inherited from the song prior while the melodic vocals, still part-shout, sneer out the title line. It’s an exciting sound at its root, and Torche never gave the impression of not knowing what they were going for as a band, even as an LP like 2015’s Restarter (review here) expanded the sonic palette, and so when they end “Hellion” by scorching the ground with feedback, there’s little chance it’s a coincidence. Torche have laid waste. It took them less than 20 minutes to do so.
That’s the underlying message of In Return, really. If you heard Torche at the time it came out and were curious who this band were going to become, In Return provided a vital, crushing answer, with maximum efficiency. Torche couldn’t very well have spent their career putting out half-albums and attained the kind of profile they did, but they were unquestionably suited to the format, and In Return demonstrates their ability to tell a story in sound, mirroring the relative brevity of their songs themselves with the presentation thereof. I don’t have a bad word to say about their work more broadly unless you count “fuck yeah,” but that In Return was anything more than a tossoff to begin with epitomizes the singular nature of it and the band, who for all the acclaim they received during their run still seem to be somewhat underappreciated in what they accomplished.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thank you for reading.
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This weekend is kind of a marathon. Tonight we’re going to Connecticut, then tomorrow back down to NJ to see Slomosa at Starland Ballroom, and Sunday we’re having family friends over, so yeah, I expect by the start of next week I’ll be duly shitkicked. Big change.
Thanks to everybody who checked out the Desertfest NYC coverage last week. I got some nice comments particularly about the photos, which was great since I’m well aware taking pictures isn’t always my strong suit. I did get some decent ones though. Maybe hanging out with the likes of Tim Bugbee had an effect, though it feels like flattering myself to even think so. Maybe I was just the right amount of stoned. Who knows.
Look out for a Terry Gross review next week, that Slomosa live review, and premieres for Starmonger, Northern Heretic and Caixao. We’re coming up on the next Quarterly Review. I had wanted to do it at the start of September — you can see how that went by the lack of Quarterly Review happening — and as a result of not getting it done, it’s currently slated for two weeks starting Oct. 7. There’s a ton coming out right around then, and I’m already doubled-up on some of those days, which isn’t what I want to be when I’m already writing about 10 different releases in one post, but I’ve done it before and I’ll survive again. It will be good to have another 100 albums off my back in terms of things I want to have covered in some way — whether that’s Alunah (out today), Massive Hassle, Steve Von Till, Castle and Elder or Sandveiss, Endless Floods, Land Mammal and Satan’s Satyrs. One way or the other, it is packed. I’ve got like two slots left and then I need to start putting in alternatives and filling the next one.
Some of that stuff I’m behind on, but one thing about that is I think I care less about timeliness than I ever have. Part of that is reactionary. I see things on social media, bands of the minute, whatever it is, and while I know lists can be fun however often they’re derided for ranking things that shouldn’t be ranked — a fair argument — to me it just seems emblematic of the current disposability of creative work. It says that this stuff matters when it comes out and then it goes away to make room for the next thing. I’ll do a year-end list this year because I feel like I have to, like it’s expected of the site and good for me to have to refer to later, but I can’t help but feel like new music is given an expiration date when it neither needs nor deserves one. If an album came out in June, what, that means October is too late? By what standard could that possibly be true in anything other than the setting of panicked internet FOMO capitalism in which the heavy underground permeates?
As far as that does, I’m a do what I want, and by my own standard. That’s why I started this site in the first place. That doesn’t make me cool, just old and ornery. The cool kids share memes.
I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Have fun out there while the weather’s still good (if it is where you are) and don’t forget to hydrate. See you back here Mubblesday for that Slomosa review and whatever news I’m probably trying to catch up on. Ha.
FRM.
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Tags: Florida, In Return, Miami, Robotic Empire, Torche, Torche In Return
