Having formed in 2003 while its members were in middle school, Title Fight had begun in typically wobbly fashion with several pop-punk demos, split singles and EPs. Then, in the spring of 2011, the breakthrough had arrived in the form of "Shed," their debut LP, a blistering, throat-shedding blend of Gorilla Biscuits, Turning Point and Jawbreaker that won the heart of every hardcore and punk kid from the Warped Tour to Chaos In Tejas, and of every critic from Alternative Press to NME. When the follow-up LP, "Floral Green," unexpectedly appeared a scant 16 months later, it bore some new, high-end influences (Hum, Slowdive, the Sundays) and engendered the reasonable assumption that Title Fight had landed comfortably in its Mature Period. "Hyperview," Title Fight's third LP, sets those assumptions on their head. Taking the measure of "Hyperview's" massive leap forward from previous releases is difficult to accomplish with words. The listener is periodically struck by faint echoes of the familiar (the "Floral Green"-ishly tuneful and driving "Chlorine") and of the canonical (the incantatory downstroke 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"), but this is an album that renders futile the exercise of conceiving bands as sums of influences.
