THIS ALBUM SO GOOD

We’ve all gotten that handshake that’s maybe a little too firm, accompanied by a grin that’s a little too sly. Not as a slight or as a gesture of intimidation—but as reassurance. A handshake that insinuates subtle decorum from an affirming presence, or a wild admiration for a sense of occasion. Toxic Sincerity greets you in such a manner. Hand-in-hand, devious, and with all the power of suggestion of real companionship, the album presents an offer you can’t refuse for compassionate music. Taken from the maligned premise of toxic masculinity and featuring much of the iconography therein—leisure suits, ramada hotels, and weightlifting programs—the album inverts tropes into a plea for world intimacy on fundamental psychological levels. Initially suggested as a joke from Jack Callahan, the album’s namesake prods at elements of Torn Hawk’s comedic impulses, effervescent personality, tendency to overshare, and overlapping, backsliding, and virtuosic thought processes. 

Toxic Sincerity also contains a kind of toxic fidelity—a media haze of crystalline synths and brass swells, e-piano, and guitars that evoke everything from infomercial segues, to Vangelis, to Bruce Willis action scenes, to The Edge’s delay prowess. Taken in stride with a B-roll narrative of conspiratorial looks, bad blind dates, screaming into pillows, and love bombing, this kitchen sink sonic pallette creates a motorik momentum that propels the album to emotional heights … and depths. The unique emotional phrenology of Torn Hawk is one of emotional sincerity in media—an acceptance of the sleight of hands and magician-like tricks that play across our consumption of it—and the contradictions, tensions, and tautologies that dance within it. Sincerely reveling in this, Torn Hawk accents the fidelity with numerous skits across the album that reveal the vulnerability of cold chicken breast dinners, the revolutionary comfort of chess games & tortellini and the mutinies within the inner TiVo offices. These series of stream-of-consciousness stand-up bits augment the musical numbers, the “big heavy crows swooping in with irredeemable heartbreak,” with their own spiraling pontifications. Utterly beguiling, they showcase that despite how hard it is “to step out into the cold with new characters,” efforts for radical transparency and empathy—perhaps a toxic sincerity—are an irresistible way to pull others in.   --- Nick James Scavo