Torche - Admission

Torche have been a pivotal figure in the opening up of modern sludge/stoner doom to the melodic for the past several years. The Miami-based quartet have based their sound heavily upon the combination of the psychedelia of stoner rock and the thickness of The Hunter-era Mastodon’s brand of melodic sludge. The band’s last album before this, Restarter, found them refining even more the melodic aspect of their sound, only to go quiet in the creative ring until now. And now that they’re back the band have further honed their sound with their fifth full-length here, Admission.

Torche certainly put some meticulous work into this album to make it as varied and constantly engaging as possible. The band’s best moments on this album come from when they channel the most potent aspects of their sound into smart compositions focused on highlighting their improved versatility through intriguing psychedelic grooves or infectious riffs. The catchy southern rock riff of “Slide”, for example, that slips in and out of these spacier pre-choruses showcases the band’s ability to work with more than just the usual elements of the style to freshen up their sludge rather than just lay out another laborious trudge through thick instrumental mud. The brief song “What Was” finds the band flexing their riff power in a different vein, with the rhythm section simply tastefully supporting a bouncy, mid-paced guitar groove for a minute and a half, making for a nice, welcome moment of variety on the album.

On the more traditional side of things, the song “Infierno” works its way cleanly around a massive onslaught of down-tumed sludge riffs and through booming bass hits and percussive crashes. The title track, by contrast, incorporates rather smoothly the kind of shimmering, shoegaze-influenced guitar work that Deftones often dips into, and the bright, harmonious vibe of the track makes for another wonderful interpolation of the band’s style that, again, shows just how much they put into doing more with their sound by spicing up their recipe from time to time. And it pays off.

Songs like the low-tuned, slow-burning “Times Missing”, the thick doomy dirge of “On the Wire”, and the more overtly Alice in Chains-inspired dig of “Extremes of Consciousness” contrast the band’s classical instrumental style of stoner sludge with singer Steve Brook’s Magma-esque delivery of transfixing melodies and occasional grunge-style harmonies.

The album’s low points really are few. The opening song’s riffage is a bit drab and repetitive, and I found the song “Reminder” to not really bring much in the way of anything exciting or novel to the track list aside from its oddly truncated structure, not really up to par with the vibrance of the songs surrounding it either. Its main riff is also a bit repetitive even for the song’s brevity.

The closing track, “Changes Come”, gets a bit more into that Deftones-flavored shoegaze that the title track did, but in not quite as spirited a manner as the title track, ending the album on a note more apathetic than ideal. Truthfully, it’s not a horrible song and, in my opinion, the best of the low-light songs here; the band just showed themselves capable of far better earlier in the album and it just feels like a bit of an unfitting peter-out end to an excitingly assorted album.

With sludge making quite big moves this year in both its melodic and oppressively crushing forms through the likes of Spirit Adrift, Baroness, and Inter Arma, Torche had a lot to live up to, and Admission is certainly a worthy and welcome return from their four-year creative absence that showcases their mastery with their long-honed craft.

Colorful molasses/10