True hardcore is hard to find.
NEVER ENOUGH | artist: Turnstile — I can remember a contemporaneous review in MRR saying that Lungfish had gone soft — saying that "Creation Story" from 1993's Rainbows from Atoms was nothing more than a bad U2 song. It is, of course, something of a tradition going back to the original Hardcore and first-generation post-Hardcore bands that as soon as the clean electric guitar or the melodic yell (as opposed to the pedantic shout) kicks in, you are nothing more than soft. Or even worse, a sell-out.
In 2015 the P-Funk All Stars played Baltimore's outdoor Artscape Festival. Set up on stage at the art school, in front of the old railroad depot, George Clinton and company tore through a set of hits and brought that Baltimore crowd to life. And they needed it. This was the summer of 2015. Only months prior, in April of 2015, the Baltimore Uprising — in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody — had occurred. The P-Funk show was the first time since the events of April that the people of Baltimore had come together in what was apparent to anyone there as a sort of communal release.
A few weeks ago, in the wake of everything happening in the US, a big crowd came together in Baltimore for another release of emotion, this time in Wyman Dell — a green space nestled just south of the Homewood campus of the Johns Hopkins University. Earlier in the day, bands had played at the outdoor Remington Festival, just several blocks from the Dell. Occasional lampposts along the way were plastered with a flyer that said that Turnstile would be playing a free show in the Dell at 6pm.
10,000 people showed up.
Baltimore again came together in a show of communal release.
Turnstile's new album — NEVER ENOUGH — is a lot of things. And a lot of people will have a lot of opinions about it. In that its shifting rhythms, exuberance, and sense of being (I can think of no other way to describe the co-mingling of complete confidence and total vulnerability) the album represents a distilled variety of hope and a feel for making the personal the communal — this is the most hardcore thing of all and it is the band's greatest accomplishment.
The rippers are here — the front side of SUNSHOWER is a highlight of that color on Turnstile's template. But it is the glowing arcs of light that beam across and through tracks in the form of pads and ambience and flickering delays that play on the emotions — these ambient passages do the work of the dramatic set up. And they represent a kind of thoughtfulness and attention to mood that lets the resultant climax — such as the feral frontside of LOOK OUT FOR ME — fully blister.
This is an evolution from what emerged from the last album, and in this ebb and flow between bombast and ambience, pitched yell and conversational speech that can have the effect of putting memory front and center, it presents a more whole vision and allows the music to envelope and fully wrap around the community. The nod to Baltimore Club kick patterns (rhythms which have always been either under the surface or in the parallel awareness of the best Baltimore "rock music" bands since at least the early 90s) further cements Turnstile as not just a band, but something of a representative of a certain way of thinking about the relationship between the music we all make, listen to, fall in love with, and struggle over and the broader context — in this case a city, a history — in which everything exists like concurrent waves of car radio emanations collaging over a summertime traffic jam.
SEEIN' STARS lays it out further with a hint of Future Islands and a bit of some of the poppier lost gems from the Baltimore underground such as the 80s inflected White Life. That this leads into the throatpunch of BIRDS only heightens the vitality of each end of the spectrum. More than anything — amongst all of the melody, hooks, grind — there is a connection waiting to happen here. It is available if you want it. If you don't want to tap into it, whatever. Your choice. If you don't get it, that's on you. Because by the time that the pop propulsion of TIME IS HAPPENING has ended and the elegiac MAGIC MAN has ushered you out of the theater, this album will have become a touchstone album for so many of those who are willing to connect. Who need to connect, not just with this music but with one another. Communally. Like strangers in a big field showing up to hear the heavens open up and maybe have some fun in revolt against all the pain and chaos.
This is one that people will talk about in 20 years and in talking about it will remember something about themselves long forgotten. | 5 out of 5 stars.
