“God reached his hand down from the sky. He flooded the land and he set it on fire.”
The Thermals – The Body, the Blood, The Machine – 2006
I can’t begin to explain how important music was to me in 2006. Lizzie had just died. Finding my happy was next to impossible. What’s amazing is that none of the music that I discovered that year reminds of that time. All of the really good stuff transcends that terrible event. It was all just so damned good.
On Soulseek (oh, how I miss you, Soulseek) I was starting to see the name of a band that I thought sounded cool. The Thermals sounded like a New Wave band that I would have discovered in 1982 and tried to convince everyone how great they were.
The year and the genre were wrong and everything else was right.
A three piece power punk garage group with a sound and message larger than the band’s number. Their 3rd album, The Body, the Blood, The Machine is a bloodletting. More often than not drawing on biblical themes of violence and religious hypocrisy, the songs on BBM contain some of the most terrific melodies against a backdrop of faith based pain.
“Here’s Your Future” spits God’s words and needs at Noah and Jesus with such venom one wonders if this is a deity we should worship.
“I Might Need You To Kill” takes us to the next level, after all, God has asked a lot of the likes of Abraham and Isaac.
Songwriter, guitarist and lead singer Hutch Harris’ thin, nerdy voice is so perfect when he sings “It’s time for reassignment, time for a new first world order” on “An Ear for a Baby”. Or “I regret leaving at all, I forgot I needed God like a Big Brother”. He’s like a truth prophet, minister, evangelist, punk, town crier all rolled into one. “Good luck putting even a dent in the mission, the dream, the body, the blood, the machine.” How can a sound this big and damning come from just a guitar, drum and bass??? It does and you best be listening to it LOUD.
Thing is, The Thermals aren’t a Christian rock band. It just happened, from what I’ve read, that the songs took on this shape and these themes. Sometimes a muse takes hold of a songwriter and guides his hand and voice and guitar to a place no one would have expected. Or could have.
The Body, the Blood, The Machine is easily one of the great records of the past decade. Perhaps one of my favorites ever. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Grade: A+
Aside: Everything. This album won’t let you down.
The Thermals – Now We Can See – 2009
It didn’t take much to get me excited about the new Thermals album. But, I’d already suffered my disappointments with The Fratellis & The Hold Steady, 2 more discoveries from 2006 whose follow-ups were not as exciting as the original. I was prepared for Now We Can See to pale in comparison to The Body, the Blood, The Machine. It would be impossible to top that record and I didn’t expect it to. BBM is different from Hold Steady’s Boys & Girls or The Fratelli’s Costello Music. It was a once in a lifetime record. A Born to Run. A Thriller. You can’t catch lightning like that again. I was prepared for a letdown. What I wasn’t prepared for was for there to be one song on the new record that was, well, actually, catchy. Radio friendly. Possibly, even, a hit.
The song-crafting on Now We Can See is exactly the same. Dependable. Upbeat garage pop. Maybe a little more frenetic, excited. That doesn’t mean that it’s redundant or repetitive. It’s elegiac in it’s own way.
Obsessed with water and death this time, Hutch Harris brings his 3 minute pop sensibilities to new themes with a sound that seems to embrace pop music just a little bit. The guitar licks are familiar and melodic, instead of just being angular and jagged.
The near 80s “oh way oh-ow oh woah”s of the title demand that you sing along. It’s new wave pop punk at it’s finest. I defy you not to dance in your kitchen while Harris is singing “But the images don’t stick. Our enemies lay dead on the ground. And still we kick!” or “We still need the medicine quick. We still take the pill but only for the fix.” And the teeniest but most perfectly laid guitar solo brings the track to a new place.
The water/death themes run throughout the albums, making most of their impact on “At the Bottom of the Sea” & “Liquid In, Liquid Out”.
“When We Were Alive” simply shreds and before it even registers it’s gone.
“How We Fade” takes the death idiom to a it’s most desperate and reflective and drives us to the (water themed) coalescence of “You Dissolve”. “You dissolve. It’s just another way you exist. It’s the only way you depart.”
I’m tempted to not give the record as high a rating as the previous but that because, A) I don’t want to diminish the previous album’s brilliance however B) I’m afraid that Now We Can See will get a lesser grade because there is no surprise for the listener after BBM, which is such a stupefyingly great album.
What to do? Perhaps the repetition of “When I was Afraid” or “I Called Out Your Name” might feel like a band that relies on certain songwriting tricks and templates. But, had I not heard BBM, I might not think so.
Usually a review of a record that doesn’t build on a sound but offers the same type of music a second time around would garner a bad review and a suggestion that “you don’t need to hear this record” but I think you DO need to hear this record. Right after the previous one. Because Harris and gang won’t let you down.
Grade A
A Side: Now We Can See, Liquid in Liquid Out, How We Fade
BlindSide: When I Died, We Were Sick, I Let It Go, At the Bottom of the Sea,
