If I have anything bad to say about Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me, it is that I miss choruses or any repeating line on the disc. Those repeating bits were what helped guide me through the wilds of …To The Beat Of A Dead Horse and without them, Parting The Sea… is hard to get a grip on. I’m cognizant enough of the screamo genre to recognize that these are real good, quasi-traditional compositions within the style, but these thirteen songs feel perhaps a little too focused and a little too lean. I can describe plenty of different tempos on the record (at least a couple points feel like ENVY in miniature!), but there’s something about Parting the Sea… that feels samey to me. Maybe it’s the track lengths. There are three songs that are 1:06 and the longest one is 2:21. Half of the disc is between 1:29 and 1:53. Whatever else Parting The Sea… is, its total running time of 20:48 means it’s also really damn quick.

Worth noting: Like everything else Deathwish puts out, there’s an undercurrent of desperation and frustration that runs through the disc. At no point do I doubt the band’s sincerity. Ed Rose’s recording style (described by the vocalist Jeremy Bolm, and I am paraphrasing, “mixing his work with THE GET UP KIDS and COALESCE”) is unexpectedly warm. I don’t know what it adds or subtracts. Bolm’s voice is richly recorded. With regards to the lyrical content, it’s squarely in the vein of letting down friends/lovers, missing family and the “sitting sitting sitting in a van-yet somehow wanting more,” as HAVE HEART put it. “Sesame” has a particularly good lyric, “there’s a thousand reasons why I can’t open up/every combination is one turn off” but then follows it up with the banal and not quite so clever wordplay “there’s no rest for the weak/I need a week’s rest desperately” to close out the song. The deluxe version of the LP has a number of high quality photos which reinforce the themes of loss, isolation and deserted streets. While not crucial to the listening experience, they’re interesting to look at, at least.

I think Parting the Sea… is a record that is squarely focused on the already converted. Do you like west-coast screamo or emoviolence? There is Something For You here. Everyone else, less so. TOUCHE ARMORE might have cut a little close to their face on Parting the Sea… but I see a grin in the gore that tells me TOUCHE AMORE wanted the scars exactly this way.