TURNSTILE - Never Enough

Turnstile's alternative rock is so deeply rooted in a specific era, a specific sound and a specific imagery, that listening to it transfigures and transforms everything around whoever approaches it. You're catapulted into Baltimore at the turn of the millennium, during an end-of-college party, wearing cargo shorts and a baseball cap for your favorite football team. Beer and sweat flow in rivers.

However, amid all this coming and going of steroid-pumped guitars, part post-hardcore and part nu metal, Brendan Yates and the rest of the band never let that more reflective, dreamy streak doze off - made of dives and musings in dream-pop, which made their formula so special starting with "Glow On".

“Never Enough”, programmatically proclaimed in caps-lock, doesn't betray the winning formula: on the contrary, it beefs it up. It bulks up the guitars' muscles, rolls out even more radio-friendly choruses and unleashes one crowd-pleasing refrain after another. Time to fill arenas, they must have told themselves.

Take the opener and title track: had it come out twenty-odd years ago, we'd still be singing it today. The instant structure, the sections arranged like by a fussy surveyor, the euphoric guitar blasts, the chorus coated in double-sided tape: everything is engineered to wreak havoc. At least until the song happily drowns in a dream-pop sea, where it will find a different kind of praise. "Look Out For Me" and "Sunshower" follow the same script with different accents, the former leaning more nu metal, the latter angrier and more hardcore.

Here too, though, there's an "at least until." Even more unpredictable this time, because the chaos spills into a zen meditation for flute and organ drone. Absurd, especially right after the racket Daniel Fang makes on drums just a moment before, yet it all works. Boy, does it work.

You can't even say that Turnstile always follow the same script. Because there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. "I Care" would appeal to Paul Westerberg, both for the verses embroidered with deliciously power-pop guitars and for the post-adolescent chorus sung with your heart in your throat; while "Dreaming" grafts spirited brass interventions onto the usual nu metal ruckus.

For fans of sharper edges there's "Birds," which does eventually explode, but only after an incredible droning opening, where drums and sticks once again steal the show.

Turnstile do have one problem, though. They were born twenty years too late, because at the start of the century they would have won over half of Generation Y. Indie kids and Limp Bizkit-loving students alike.

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11/06/2025