:: Track Listing

1. Here’s Your Future
2. I Might Need You to Kill
3. An Ear for Baby
4. A Pillar of Salt
5. Returning to the Fold
6. Test Pattern
7. St. Rosa and the Swallows
8. Back to the Sea
9. Power Doesn’t Run on Nothing
10. I Hold the Sound

:: Record Review

The Thermals

The Body, The Blood, The Machine
(Sub Pop; 2006)

Rating: 85%
Combined Rating: 81%


So, fuck -- I almost wrote off these peeps after Fuckin’ A’s sophomoric Blitzkrieg shots, but, lo and behold, The Body, The Blood, The Machine is a fruitful metamorphosis, the Thermals emerging fully-fledged from their preppy lo-fi pupal sac as winged apostles of the Apocalypse, cleverly immersing their third album’s rejuvenating and unit-shifting production in death and disbelief.

The perverse combination of swaggering, sledgehammer riffs rooted in life-affirming gusto with lyrics that flesh out a panoply of decayed vistas -- a world rotten at the core of its religious wormhole -- allows Hutch Hatcher’s nascent arsenal of hook-infested melodies to bask in the lugubrious delights of “CONCEPT.” Yeah, I thought this album was going to suck too, but despite what others might have mistakenly construed, Harris hasn’t pulled a Billie Joe and heaped a melange of mythical grottos and futuristic trash idols onto his seismic foundations -- the sound of The Blood is suitably insistent, as is its message, but never at the risk of wading into nebulous dogma.

Like The Thermal’s other standout, More Parts Per Million, the pussyfooting around is kept firmly in check, a sole organ buzz introducing the gatecrashing guitar riff that opens the record. Not only directed at its audience, the band seems to have also grasped a fresh lease on life, packing the same abrasive, aural punch as the tape spool-blowing feedback-induced hysteria of a “It’s Trivia,” but swapping the lopsided production aesthetic with a more seasoned approach -- the drums, played by bassist Kathy Foster due to Jordan Hudson’s departure last year -- even out the vicious, ear-ringing attack of the past with the a consistent, steamrolling, progressive momentum. Whereas we were once treated to snotty bleats of “where the hell you wanna be?!”, it’s now the thunder from the mountains declaiming, rather than asking, “yeah. Here’s Your Future!”

The album, fittingly, never lets up, buoyed by the earnest, wide-eyed delivery of an army of little Kele Okerekes on the escape trail from a “giant fist out to crush us.” The catchy synth lines that litter “A Pillar of Salt” masquerade as emergency sirens, perfectly tailored to the onwards and upwards rush of the backing track’s shooting guitars and machine gun drumming. Harris’ delivery, power-charged yet deeply subversive, undercuts and sketches new, thrilling dimensions to the music as he wilfully exclaims, “we were born to sin! / We don’t think we’re special, sir / We know everybody is.” Sarcasm in the face of destruction, the Thermals simultaneously take up and lambaste the voice of those who send their “dead weight…on to heaven.”

The band wonderfully shuffles the rhythm and executes the exact same riff for following track “Returning to the Fold,” opening line “I remember even my soul” soaring self-consciously into the past, marking The Blood as a record whose tracks bleed into and feed off each other’s ideas, whose tracks are just as carefully thought through as they are vehemently developed. Indeed, although it’s been ebulliently shown time and time over that the Thermals can carve out fetching angles like a mid-period Guided by Voices covering the Buzzcocks in a white noise snow blizzard, their songwriting intuition has often surmounted the initiative of considered craftsmanship, resulting in some exciting but ultimately frustrating listening experiences. It’s here that the band delivers on their promise, escaping the suffocating manacles of the “genre-defining classic” to put themselves forth as a singular band, first and foremost, rather than the tailgate members of the eternally dated feel of “lo-fi.” The memorable riffs here aren’t left to fester and wax the imagination as they were before, but are built upon the longer song lengths rightly hinting at the mixed modes these tracks delve in.

Take “Power Doesn’t Run on Nothing,” for example. Hitting the ground running with some tightly-paced Fab Moretti hi hat rhythms, the riff plays out, solid and dependable, windmilling and overdriven, setting up the board from which Harris’s mercurial voice can jump and dive through the registers as he takes up the role on the wavering conductor, shouting “Let the beat roll over!” before busting out one of those slower-paced codas in which every instrument assumes pole position in a steady victory procession, a trebly guitar solo riding the crest of the time-frozen wave as if to say, “look! We can do this!”

Previously ignored and marginalised by the major indie press in the face of faux dance-punk and elaborate avante-garde movements, it’s downright exciting for a band like the Thermals to emerge with something so simple and unflustered, so bereft of unnecessary baggage, a shining light of a record that delivers on its early promise, an energised and infectiously confident stab at the big time. It’s all too clearly laid down in “Power”: “so give us what we’re asking for / ‘cause either way -- we’re gonna take it!”

Alan Baban :: 3 September 2006 |