[September 18th 2012 – SideOneDummy Records // Find it at: iTunes | Insound]
______________________________________________________________
If Shed was a lonely ceiling light worth hanging onto, Title Fight’s Floral Green is a graphic continuation that guts out any false meaning to life and builds a sanctuary to sleep in. Second efforts can be often reduced to pathetic shots at putting popularity in a chokehold but for the four-piece, modern terms like “mainstream” are grated into their naked state of being where deep emotions like feeling completely lost or grinding out a tragedy replace your pay-by-the-click fiction. That being said, Floral Green isn’t pretty on the outside. Between subjects of battling personal disappointment (“Leaf”) and the feeling of slipping (“Numb, But I Still Feel It”), the band layer melodies over their coarse, infectious stab at punk rock, which moving on from its initial stage, has now grown to be thick, sporadically enraged and even brilliantly moving as their play on intensity throbs at a tightly-knit volume.
“Sympathy” and “Secret Society” feed on jagged tempos laced with black and white imagery, “Make You Cry” is a tasteful spill of harsh reality puncturing like a rusted knife and even the harmonious intro to “Calloused” gets ripped open by a wounding pattern of chords. Underneath it’s tough surface, it’s still gorgeous material even if Title Fight haven’t tried to recreate, rather than refine, their signature. Which begs the question: do they really need to? A standard to music will force the opportunity but the teenager kicking off an amp to their choice of background noise will gladly fire back in disagreement. Lines such as “Remembering you’ll watch your parents die” stem from the language of hurt, and like the lyricism behind “Lefty” or the organic beginnings to punk rock, it only blooms in its raw state, letting a listener latch on to an experience already burned into their skin and feel content, solace or security. Bitterness may be a harder sell but it, like the scarring beauty to Floral Green, proves hardcore isn’t a passing trend.
Download: “Secret Society”, “Calloused”, “Lefty”, “Make You Cry”
[Find updates on new albums, daily music news and other things on Twitter]