Touché Amoré, 'Hard To Explain'

On this blessed Bandcamp Friday, when that music platform waives revenue fees for 24 hours so artists can pocket all the profits, you can always expect a number of surprise album drops, vault clearings and whatnot. The deluge is always overwhelming, but bursts like a confetti canon of new music. So let's start here: a surprising Strokes cover from L.A. post-hardcore band Touché Amoré. The Strokes' Is This It? came out 20 years ago, an album over-hyped as rock's great hope, but over time its droll and dry, yet pulsing, sense of cool has proven to last. Touché Amoré is the opposite: an excitable, emotional careen across an urgent, post-hardcore energy. Here the clipped guitars and tight drumming of the original are exploded into the kind of Replacements-y thrust of Touché Amoré's finest moments. Jeremy Bolm removes the subtext of "Hard to Explain" (a young person uncertain how to navigate the everyday and distrusting of age) as he screams the text: "I say the right thing, but act the wrong way."

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