“I didn’t walk into Tolerance with a character to portray. I would decide that a song felt good if it hurt a little bit.” That’s Emmett Rogers Fightmaster (known more familiarly as E.R. Fightmaster and as a star of TV series like Grey’s Anatomy and Shrill) talking about the process of building their debut album, Tolerance. Like the title suggests, the album is about withstanding, enduring, and suffering. It’s a document of not being reduced to rubble, of standing up to go another round with the world. “So you don’t wanna marry me, well, alright,” opening track “Move Through” begins. Its frank and accepting tone is immediately disarming and lets the listener know what is coming. It’s not so much that punches aren’t pulled, but rather the grisly aftermath of time in the ring is shown in clear light.
Across the album you’ll find lyrics that pierce harshly on first glance but are delivered with an almost winsome and yielding manner. “You’re angry with the wrong guy, I’m hanging over landmines,” they sing on the earworm chorus of “Quicksand” with the candor of a therapist laying out the facts to a client. On the understated catharsis of “Press Release”, Fightmaster comes to terms with the fact that fighting an ex’s narrative is futile; “I thought about the grace required to let someone leave with whatever story they need to survive the leaving,” they explain in the album’s own press release. In a world where quick vengeance and clickbait headlines take priority, it’s refreshing to hear what essentially feels like a shrug in the face of someone trying to incite a duel. “If you need a villain in this story about yourself, that’s alright / You’re not mine, you’re not mine.”
This directness that Fightmaster opts for also works best musically; when they hit on a good hook it snags hard and reels the listener in. “All Or Nothing”’s drive snatches you up for the ride, “All Fours”’ needle-like guitars against a full and dynamic percussion track stick in your head long after the track’s hasty exit; and aforementioned “Quicksand” is a track that will linger long into the latter half of the year thanks to a swirl of sparkling synths, guitar breakdowns, and clean hooks. On the gritty and horny “Glide” the direct tone comes with an unflappable sprechgesang style, making for a standout moment at the centre of the album. “You can tie me up and take it all from me / Subjugation isn’t love, it’s lust, baby,” they explain with a commanding tone before letting some softness seep in during the infectious chorus. It’s a bold move, and when the album teeters into adult contemporary soft rock (the coffee shop khaki tone of “Versailles”, the muddled and overstuffed mythological metaphors of “Minotaur”), it makes a welcome left turn that the listener is left wanting more of.
Still, while not perfect, Tolerance’s bluntness and frank approach is its best feature and it makes the prospect of what is next for Fightmaster an exciting thing to reckon with. Their ownership of issues affecting them makes for lyric sheets that can sometimes read like diaristic insights sprinkled with some profundity (“Forever has a way of feeling shorter every day”) while also veering into faceless yearning (“I already missed you before the moment that you left”). This coupled with candid come-ons like (“Let me put every part of you inside of my mouth” on the almost alarmingly amorous “All Fours”) and calls to arms (“Put your dukes up, don’t be humble / It’s time to show these motherfuckers how you rough and tumble” on “Rumble”, a rally against both adulterous ex-husbands and immigration authorities), it shows there different facets to Fightmaster’s forthrightness. There is pain at the root of much of it, but that’s not a weakness; as they show on Tolerance, pain is the place to grow from.
