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. In 2011, Title Fight released their debut album, Shed, followed by their sophomore release Floral Green (2012). After spending almost a decade finding an approach that worked, Title Fight had voluntarily embarked on the road to finding another approach that would work — maybe even work better.
In comes Hyperview, the follow-up release to Title Fight's 2013 release the Spring Songs EP. Produced by Will Yip in Conshohocken, PA, it is Title Fight's eagerly anticipated third full length album and their first with Anti-. Dreamy guitars weigh heavy and carry the meaning of the songs, while hazy vocals make the album feel like the soundtrack to a gorgeous dream. 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.
