Torche

Album Review

Torche came into existence as an underground supergroup composed of vocalist/guitarist Steve Brooks (of stoner rockers Floor), lead guitarist Juan Montoya (also of Floor, plus sludgecore icons Cavity), bassist Jon Nunez (of grindcore merchants Shitstorm), and drummer Rick Smith (of every other band you can imagine), so their pedigree and experience were never in question so much as what in blazes their eponymous 2005 debut album would actually sound like. This, as it turned out, was an amalgam of sound, aptly dubbed "thunder-pop" by the group, whose prior lives in all of those " — core" bands certainly informed the brevity of their songs (most of which lasted but one- or two-and-a-half minutes), but otherwise yielded ample evidence of stoner rock, doom, post-grunge, post-metal, and, yes, power pop! The last of these genres was most prevalent in turbulently melodic offerings like "Mentor," "Erase," and "Vampyro," while other, coarser grinds such as "Charge of the Brown Recluse" and "Holy Roar" paid tribute to the primal sludge of Cavity, EyeHateGod, and the Melvins. Somewhere in between, multifaceted fare like "F**k Addict," "Rockit," and "Make Me Alive" revealed Soundgarden to be a major influence on Torche's light/dark sensibilities; and in the nine-minute behemoth, "The Last Word," the quartet's journey from ethereal atmospherics to psychedelic sludge, and back again, made the song sound like Deep Purple's "Child in Time" for the post-rock new millennium (results may vary depending on drug use). All in all, Torche's debut plays out like a musical asteroid field, where chaotic and even seemingly haphazard collisions between foreign sonic objects yields frequently unpredictable and startlingly original new hybrids.