Genres, styles and passions: we all have ours, and it’s what guides us in our day-to-day lives, always giving the best suggestion for what we’re going to go through in this adventure of ours.
One day we are listening to more depressing music, which characterises our mood of sullenness or the rain that is darkening the atmosphere, the next we are in a fiesta mood and we only want to dance to the rhythm of that music that doesn’t let us take our feet off the ground.
Today we set off from Lisbon and cross the Atlantic. We arrived in Boston, in the United States of America, and we arrived with great enthusiasm. We love discovering talent – and today is one of those days. Meet True Faith and their debut album.
THEY CAN ALWAYS HURT YOU MORE
The name suggests the band delivers: “True Faith” may well be one of Mancunian New Order‘s biggest ever hits, but it’s on the other side of the ocean that we relive one of the biggest bands of the 70s/80s: Joy Division.
The band started out as a solo project of lead singer and guitarist Travis Benson and takes into account his love for the post-punk and deathrock genre. Benson’s passion is joined by Quentin Moyer on the other guitar, Dylan Kotliar on bass, Francisco Ilabaca on Sunth and Tom Weir on Drums.
All together they bring to our skin bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, Pulp, Ride, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Church and the aforementioned Joy Division and New Order.
It’s 2021 – and the time is right to bring the best of this genre of music to the table. And that’s what these Bostonians offer. “They Can Always Hurt You More” is True Faith’s debut album, released on 02 November 2021. The lyrics are clear as water, the instrumental hits us in the heart: they talk about their breaking points and about everything that disturbs them in their city routine, be it problems in their jobs, relationships or other obligations, they show, in a clear, raw and thick way, a way of dealing with everything that passes in front of us.
Silence, because the instruments will put us in our senses: we have nine songs, separated by about forty minutes.
“Moral Hazard”, the first song on the album, starts with a sense guitar, which goes on a supreme crescendo where all the instruments connect in a tremendous symbiosis. And it is more or less in the middle that Travis’ incredible voice appears, which reminds us afterwards of Ian Curtis, from Joy Division, or Jamie Bardolph Taylor, from Phobophobes.
We then move on to “A Reason”, “Leucovorin Rescue”, “I Wanted More” and “Comfort Measures”. The sound is incredible and fresh, always with a hallucinating rhythm that leaves no one indifferent. We dare to say that these are some of the most beautiful melodies of the genre, making the elements, still with us, of New Order, blush.
With more electronica in the mix and a bit of a dance challenge, “The Passion” and “Something” take us to never before sailed paths, with the instrumental always crossing in an exquisite way with Benson’s voice.
“Gestalt”, one of the band’s first singles as a whole, sounds like a pure 80s revival, with a magical touch of what’s out here forty years later. We don’t just have the roots of the genres True Faith have on the table, but something revolutionary and pure, that promises to mark a generation. It’s accompanied by a music video, where we see a boy running around, frantically, in his day-to-day life of pure, hard stress, accompanied by an orange suitcase. We sense that he wants to see what’s inside, but he doesn’t feel safe where he is. And so you run. And runs. And runs. Until you reach a safe spot and voila, you see what’s inside. The rest of it? Stay with the video.
We close the disc with “Hornace”. It starts in such a calm and pondered way – as it has been usual in all the songs previously presented – but, in the chorus, it explodes in such a frenetic way that it almost bursts your eardrums. All the instruments, including the vocalist’s voice, are at their maximum. Brutal.
Belief, conviction, faith and magic: this is what True Faith promised us, this is what they delivered. Not only did they revive the 80s bug, but they also brought a different way of looking at this genre of music in the present day. “They Can Always Hurt You Home” is extraordinary, and one of the greatest pearls we found this year. A WtMM recommendation.
More on True Faith:
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