Every walk of life has its stock narrative, and the one about artists goes like this: first comes the lengthy Juvenile Period (trial, error, rejection); then, dues having been paid, bones having been made, comes the electrifying Breakthrough (critical praise, monetary windfall, general validation), which inaugurates the terminal Mature Period (respect of peers, reliable buying public, slowly diminishing relevance). Those who make it to that third stage, the story goes, might as well get comfortable, for they’ve achieved Success. There’s no further progress to be made.
In 2012, Title Fight, a four-piece from Kingston, Pa., then known for a screamingly insistent brand of melodic hardcore, was right on schedule. Having formed in 2003 while its members (bassist/vocalist Ned Russin, guitarist/vocalist Jamie Rhoden, guitarist Shane Moran, and drummer Ben Russin) were in middle school, the band’s juvenilia had begun in typically wobbly fashion with several pop-punk demos, stabilized with a split CD of more proficient pop-punk opposite a band by the can’t-make-it-up name of Erection Kids, and concluded with two seven-inch EPs’ worth of post-Lifetime thrash-beat melodrama that showed real promise. All that had taken eight years. Then, in the spring of 2011, the Breakthrough had arrived in the form of Shed, their debut LP on SideOneDummy, a blistering, throat-shedding blend of Gorilla Biscuits, Turning Point, and Jawbreaker that won the heart of every hardcore and punk kid from the Warped Tour to Chaos in Tejas — and of every critic from Alternative Press to NME. When the follow up LP, Floral Green, appeared without advance warning a scant 16 months later, it bore some new, high-end influences (Hum, Slowdive, the Sundays), and engendered the reasonable assumption that Title Fight had landed comfortably in their Mature Period. Probably another album or two in a vein similar to that of Floral Green could be expected in the ensuing five-odd years, but the band’s most interesting, exciting, and productive years were surely over.
Wrong.
Another blink-of-an-eye interval (14 months) and out came the Spring Songs EP on Revelation in November 2013: a nimble and self-assured four-song interpolation of the Alias, Sub Pop, and Matador catalogues. As 90-degree stylistic departures go, Spring Songs was uncommonly deft; as career moves go, it was utterly brazen. After spending almost a decade finding an approach that worked, Title Fight had voluntarily embarked, absent any inducement from marketplace or fanbase, on the tortuous road to finding another approach that would work — maybe even work better.
But Spring Songs was only the first salvo of the new campaign. In the summer of 2014, the band decamped to Studio 4 in Conshohocken, Pa., where with producer/engineer Will Yip they had made their last three records, and got right back to work.
“This record was us writing what we felt needed to be written,” says Ned Russin. “Just because we seemed to do one thing right once doesn’t mean we should do that for the rest of our lives, and I think in music that idea is too often pushed aside.”
What needed to be written now needs to be heard. Hyperview, Title Fight’s third LP, due out on Anti- Records in February 2015, only 15 short months since Spring Songs, represents the highest heights of artistry yet reached by the band. The achievement the record heralds is staggering: having in four years produced four recordings (three LPs and an EP) in four distinct modes of expression, each more meticulously wrought than the last, Title Fight has covered as much aesthetic ground in as little time — and with as much ambition, confidence, and finesse — as any punk band in history.
“We weren’t trying to change for changing’s sake — we weren’t consciously trying to be Radiohead, even though some of us like them,” Russin explains. “We were looking at bands like maybe Dinosaur Jr. and the Beach Boys — we were looking at the moment where they found something that had never been done before and was now being done well. We were just chasing that energy.”
Taking the measure of Hyperview’s massive leap forward from previous releases is difficult to accomplish with words. The lazy listener won’t get much tour-guiding from the vocals, which are remarkably muted and lovely when compared to the blood-curdling caterwauling of earlier work. Nor from the lyrics, which while betraying certain vague thematic motifs — heightened nocturnal consciousness, for one — are almost defiantly opaque (sample quatrain from “Dizzy”: “Your chrysalis/Nighttime wanderer/Venom drip/King of somber”). And when it comes to the music, though the listener is periodically struck by faint echoes of the familiar (the Floral Greenishly tuneful and driving “Chlorine”) and of the canonical (the incantatory pummel of My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything period, as on “New Vision”; a Scratch Acid bassline jarringly yet winningly resolving itself into a Chapterhouse swirl, as on “Hypernight”), this is an album that renders futile the exercise of conceiving bands as sums of influences, and of dutifully itemizing those influences. Hyperview can only be heard, and loved, as an artifact unto itself.
And then there’s the cover art.
“This was our third LP, so it was decided that it was going to be a departure,” says Russin. “We had a new label, so we just wanted some new imagery.”
Wilkes-Barre, Title Fight’s home cityscape, lies just across the Susquehanna from Kingston. It’s a desiccating industrial husk of a city that happens to be surrounded, poignantly, by natural beauty — a left-for-dead exemplar of the American rust belt whose economy has been ravaged but whose vicinity remains a verdant wonderland of hills, woods, and lakes. It’s a Romantic pastoral elegy come to life, and it begs to be painted. Accordingly, the previous four Title Fight record covers, all by John Garrett Slaby, a Philadelphia-based artist, depicted the region’s rural charms. For Hyperview, however, Slaby and the band ventured back into town. Gone are the campsites and starry nights; in their place, a black-and-white photograph of a mural featuring a beguilingly stark lattice of interlocking squares. It almost looks like a schematic diagram for a passageway through the imposing exterior wall in downtown Wilkes-Barre onto which Slaby applied the mural in crushed-glass luminescent paint.
And why not? If you present Title Fight with an apparent creative endpoint — if you tell them, in effect, that they’ve hit the wall — they’ll find a way through it.
TITLE FIGHT
+ Drug Church / Milk Teeth
08.05.2015: Stuttgart – Universum
09.05.2014: CH-Zürich – Kinski Klub
12.05.2015: München – Backstage Club
13.05.2015: AT-Wien – Arena
15.05.2015: Berlin – Bi Nuu
21.05.2015: Hamburg – Knust
22.05.2015: Köln – Underground
Band : Title Fight
Album : Hyperview
VÖ : 30.01.2015
Label/Vertrieb : Anti Records / Indigo
Websites:
http://titlefight.limitedrun.com/ | https://www.facebook.com/titlefight
