What can be heard in songs of British band Torches are the following:
A black lake that harbors secrets and evil. Most of the secrets and the evil stay below the surface, but it's all there. The ripples on the water send chills down your spine and right on into your blood. The five members of the band may or may not have grown up with this lake in their neighborhood.
Women dancing with wolves. It gives you shivers just thinking about those bloody-toothed beasts up on their tipsy hind legs, paws about the lady's waist and the ladies with their nails painted and moving about on high-heels.
There are sounds coming from the past. They are echoes of dead voices, or ones that have been pressed so far from the present that they may as well be dead. They ride on the waves of swollen seas of limbs and jettisoned dreams and love.
We hear a cynicism that sounds like the kind that we all have stitched inside of us. It's there with our freckles and our knocked-knees. It's there with our receding hairlines and our sagging bellies. It's a cynicism that's more like a survival guide than anything else. It's there to protect us, even if it sounds like another rainy day in Mope City. We're aware that our senses are dulling, that we're less impressed, we're less inspired and we're not blaming it on anyone else. We know it's our neck. It's our head that should fly for getting that way, but it's no less dramatic. We still try to count on other people to help us from ourselves. Torches let us hear that warm burning of a light, that hot hand slipping into our limp, cold mitt that calms the quivering. They sing, "Hold steady, hold steady or we'll just fall apart," and they might as well be wishing us the long life that we never thought we'd see.