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Over the years, the band Title Fight, formed in 2003 in Kingston, Pennsylvania, has released four albums that each carry their own distinct sound and identity. Throughout their history, the group has been categorized under several different musical genres, including pop punk, hardcore, emo, shoegaze, and more. Title Fight stands out for this very reason, they are always unafraid to evolve and reinvent their sound with each release. Their third album, Floral Green (2012), serves as a fantastic showcase of the band's development from hardcore to shoegaze, synthesizing raw intensity from hardcore with atmospheric textures of shoegaze. Title Fight’s first album, The Last Thing You Forget (2009), firmly stands its ground as the punk hardcore foundation of Title Fight. Their second album, Shed (2011), includes more melodic styles into their hardcore sound, yet still delivers an abundance of fast-paced rhythms and aggressive vocals. With Floral Green the band took a much larger step towards an ethereal, immersive shoegaze soundscape that would hint at their full shoegaze sonic palette that they would later take on in their 2015 album Hyperview.
Floral Green is a critical point when it comes to Title Fight’s development. The album adds a large number of shoegaze characteristics, such as layered guitar texture, reverb-heavy guitar tone, and slower tempos, while still retaining the hardcore, gritty vocals, raw emotion, punchy drums, and distorted tones defined in their roots. The first four tracks on Floral Green give the audience only a taste of their sound development before slowing the whole album down with the fifth track, Head in the Ceiling Fan, and fully enveloping the listener in a new musical atmosphere that the rest of the album will continue to explore. While songs at the front half of the album, such as Numb, But I Still Feel It, Leaf, and Secret Society, contain mostly intense vocals and instrumental textures, there are subtle underlying guitar parts that sound shimmery and give a slight nod to more sound experimentation to come. The third track, Like a Ritual, takes a bigger step away from the band's origins, opening with a continuation of aggressive tones and a punchy driving snare drum but layering that with another open and melodic guitar tone. In the last minute of the track, the pace of the song is drastically reduced, and the audience gets a full section of hypnotic-sounding reverb-soaked guitar and indistinguishable feedback, strongly resembling shoegaze influences. The fifth song of the album, Floral Green, is the most defining moment that represents the band’s transition to a shoegaze setting. Head in the Ceiling Fan fully detaches from their hardcore aggressive roots and kicks the song off with a slow and reverb-heavy guitar part before incorporating a very atmospheric wall of sound full of wispy vocals, feedback, distortion, delay, and reverb. The song fully subdues itself in an ethereal, immersive soundscape that perfectly matches the shoegaze aesthetic. Following Head in the Ceiling Fan, the back half of the album follows a similar formula to the hardcore-influenced songs of the first half, using gritty and high-energy instrumentation and vocals. Meanwhile, the underlying shoegaze aspects are a little more noticeable. Songs like Make You Cry, Sympathy, Frown, and Calloused, we see a greater amount of shimmering guitar sounds and change to slower tempos than the mainly hardcore tracks at the start of the album. Finishing the album off the last two tracks, Lefty and In-Between, we see another amazing blend of hardcore and shoegaze with a stronger emphasis on shoegaze influences. These two songs carry a more unique sound than their other hardcore-leaning songs. They incorporate slow-tempo sections, heavily modified guitar effects, and most importantly, they use lots of melancholic vocals, sometimes juxtaposing them with other gritty and raw emotional phrases.
The development of the album Floral Green is a great reflection of where Title Fight’s sound used to be and where it is headed. The album begins with stronger hardcore influences before slamming the audience with a sudden ethereal and immersive shoegaze soundscape and then finishing the album with more distinct blends of hardcore and shoegaze genres. Floral Green is a pivotal record in the post-hardcore scene as it demonstrates ways in which you can synthesize aggression and intensity with more layered textures and expand the boundaries of musical genres.
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Caleb G / Industry Insider
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