Gig review: Touché Amoré at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

There is a soft-spoken fragility to the frontman’s oration, quiet and restrained. It is distinctly at odds with the animalistic screams that emerge whenever he gets behind a microphone; the vocalist is both reserved Jekyll and unhinged Hyde, a bravura performance that elevates the post-hardcore outfit’s show to a higher level.

Stage Four, their latest offering, is comfortably the band’s most expansive and accessible record yet. Lyrically a concept album about Bolm’s struggle to cope with his mother’s passing, it is a more accomplished, polished musical beast than previous outings. It comes freighted with a stark pain that trades typical emo-cliché for a mature desolation; onstage, tracks such as the maudlin guilt of New Halloween and the anguished howl of Benediction see their distortion-buried grief buffed up into a rich slab of post-pop-punk, a genre-bending step forward for the group.

These aural idiosyncrasies all eventually conform back to a post-hardcore template though, where Touché Amoré truly hit their stride. Flowers and You, introduced with a surf-tinged guitar figure, segues into a blistering power-chord racket; The Great Repetition is a full-throated bellow of angst-ridden emo-punk. The few side-steps taken – the heady, heavy Rapture is as close as the band have come to a conventional arena rock song – are thrilling too; but it is the melodic, trenchant riffs of Just Exist and Pathfinder, over clattering drums and weighty bass-thumps, that ignite the raucous crowd who leap on and off the stage with a disarming frequency.

Many of the band’s tracks come in under a breezy hundred seconds each; as such, their 20-song set rattles by like rifle-fire, each song a bullet-sized pot-shot of firebrand energy. There’s a concise, controlled execution to their chaotic, ear-splitting sound; perhaps showcased no better than in the elegiac encore of Gravity, Metaphorically, which swells between gentle and furious dynamics on its way to a panoramic crescendo.

“Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts,” Bolm quietly but emphatically salutes as proceedings draw to a close. Sorrow comes in many forms, but rarely has it sounded as visceral and cathartic as this.