Review: Grievances — Rolo Tomassi
This piece was first published by The 405 on June 10, 2015. For the full article, please head here: https://www.thefourohfive.com/music/review/rolo-tomassi-grievances-143
Since Hysterics, the inaugural polyrhythmic attack dog unleashed by Rolo Tomassi in 2008, the band’s effortless transitions between their angelic and feral faces has transcended any line-up rearrangements. After Cosmology was released in 2010, the band underwent major upheaval until each instrument was propped up by a new set of arms and legs. What remains of the original group is the sibling partnership of co-vocalists Eva and James Spence, with the latter still performing chaotic keyboard duties. But Rolo Tomassi are far from a halfway house and the alterations have barely left a scratch. Maturing holistically across four releases, meet Grievances — the most emotionally diverse album of their entire catalogue.
Grievances carries its hefty weight in many ways. Opener ‘Estranged’ subverts the formula: listen back to the first track on each Rolo Tomassi release and you’ll discover a lone synthesizer guiding the induction process. This time, however, the entire band explodes in without warning, and all with the impact of a ten-tonne weight. There’s fucking debris everywhere. Grievances is the first Rolo Tomassi release that could fill an entire stadium with its primal ferocity. ‘Raumdeuter’, one of the many giants who call this album home, glides triumphantly until the first lone keyboard makes an appearance. The arpeggiated interlude is only brief, however, as the band interrupt once more to finish off with one humongous coda.
To be frank, if Hysterics was an attack dog then Grievances can feel free to choose whether it’s a lion or a tiger — you daren’t question its decision. There is meat bulging from its bones. Edward Dutton, drummer in the band until two years ago, was delightful: complete bedlam, polite intricacy, a firm grasp on any time signature — you asked, he delivered. But the forceful assault by new drummer Tom Pitts has given the group an entirely fresh dimension. The towering magnitude of Grievances’ more aggressive passages is a testament to their decision to draft him in. It helps that the sublime instrumental production allows this to be Rolo Tomassi’s clearest album to date, but the raw power blasting out of each percussive whack is entirely down to his performance.
This isn’t to say Grievances is constantly at full pelt — no Rolo Tomassi album ever has been. As stated previously, this is the band’s most emotionally diverse effort to date. Piano pieces have been drafted in on past releases to give the band a chance to pause for breath, but entire stretches of this album are tangibly fragile. The extended beginning to ‘Crystal Cascades’ hums to the sound of delicate harmonies shared by one piano, one cello and one viola and ‘Chandelier Shiver’ dedicates its duration to a beautifully graceful orchestral arrangement. The aforementioned ‘Raumdeuter’ packs a punch instrumentally but Eva delivers a heart-wrenching melody on the surface. Death is the first word that comes to mind when the album’s name is spoken aloud, and the lingering sentiment of the epic closer, ‘All That Has Gone Before’, carries the message of Rolo Tomassi’s current cycle in the hopes that it will endure into the one that follows — “There is no glory in the end.”
But the emotive confrontations aren’t limited to side B. On the surface, ‘Prelude III (Phantoms)’ comfortably continues the theme Rolo Tomassi have been recycling since day one: an early interlude to permeate the uproar. But it operates on an entirely unique level to any other song of its kind in the band’s discography. On Astraea, ‘Echopraxia’ interrupted ‘Prelude II’ and blasted all memory of it to pieces, while a similar fate befell ‘An Apology to the Universe’ once ‘Nine’ crashed into Hysterics. For Grievances, ‘Prelude III’ functions entirely as an elegant introduction to the stunning ‘Opalescent’, the former blending with the latter. They don’t so much collide as effortlessly slot together — the hand of the child locks fingers with its parent. A moment like this conveys such effortless dexterity and arguably pushes Grievances above the rest of Rolo Tomassi’s current discography in terms of technical nous.
If you could describe anything simply as Rolo Tomassi by numbers, ‘The Embers’ and ‘Funereal’ would be just that. Eva and James share vocals on both tracks — Eva alternating between coarse, abrasive screams and soaring, melodic passages — while the instrumentals drive unstoppably and staccato acutely in equal measure. Solid tracks in their own right, but in the company of what could possibly be the most propulsive work of the band’s entire career, they simply recall the days of old. And if the lowest point must be discussed, the discordant ‘Unseen and Unknown’ positions itself as an uncomfortable forty-second intrusion which unfortunately separates a trio of tracks which would have ultimately culminated in the visceral finale of ‘Stage Knives’. But never mind.
With Grievances, Rolo Tomassi seem ready to take their first step onto the stage in front of a wider audience. Not that they haven’t deserved hordes of dedicated followers since day one, even if their niche has perhaps required some smoothening over the years. But now they’re polished, beefed-up and completely autonomous. They retain core spirit as each cycle passes but mature subtly, and it’s fantastic to see a favourite band grow stronger with age.
