Torche / Meanderthal

Artist- Torche

Title - Meanderthal

Hometown - FL / GA

Label - HHI

Street Date - Now

RIYL - Cavity, Karp with more vocal melodies, Floor, Melvins, Soundgarden, Foo Fighters on steroids, Drive Like Jehu, Kyuss covering Jawbox, Quicksand

The Hits - Jump in your car and play the whole thing over and over again.

Richter Magnitude Rating Scale - Major

Some people regard their high school years as the best years of their lives but I am not one of those people; plus peaking before you are 20 is just sad. All those years ago I was mocked for having L7 like dreads and for wearing shirts that said things like "Touch Me I'm Sick." I was the first and only girl with a tattoo in my small high school and rather than study I spent my evenings going to see bands play in Hoboken, NJ and NYC alone. The week I passed my drivers license I went to see New Order, PIL, and the Sugarcubes play at the Meadowlands Arena and shop at Pier Platters, the best indie record store on the East Coast at the time. When I finally did make friends my senior year they were all older than me and from a different county in NY; just over the Jersey state line. If we weren't going to shows we sat around drinking cheap beer* in the woods somewhere but no matter what we were doing, there was music involved. Mixed tapes were a part of our every waking moment together (especially in our cars) Punk, hardcore, grunge, indie rock, and metal stretched across side A on over to side B was our permanent soundtrack. The different genres were blended together as if they were one big happy underground music family.

My memories of those teenage years are almost entirely music related and I suppose my passion for music has shadowed me ever since.

Towards my late teens and early twenties heavy bands started to dabble with mixing in melody. Seaweed, Jawbox, Quicksand, Soundgarden, and Nirvana are all great examples of this cross pollination. Torche takes one of the only likable aspects of that time in my life, a culmination of many of my early favorite bands, and manages to squish them all into one record-Meanderthal. Every song makes me want to hop in my car, crank the volume as high as it will go and wander the back streets of Bergen and Rockland county looking for a place to drink luke warm cases of beer in the privacy of a heavily wooded area.

Torche consistently hammers out heavy, I mean HEAVY riffs but then sneaks in vocals timed like Karp but bathed in masculine melodies. They are the Melvins fronted by J Robbins. They are Chavez opening for Slint. They are the best of the 90's minus all the faux pas like heroin chic rap-metal.

*Drinking before the age of 21 is the only rebellious/naughty thing I did as a teen but I look at my punishment to be the fact that we mostly drank awful bottom of the barrel crap that was more water than anything else. Kids - don't try this at home, wait until you are old enough to afford good beer!