The Thermals – Now We Can See

“Outside is in and inside is out, come on and take it easy.”
-The Beatles, “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide (Except For Me and My Monkey)”

When a rock group breaks into the national consciousness using a well established, pre-existing formula, it would logically do so with the assumption that there’s an audience already waiting to hear it. Predictably, the Thermals were lauded by many critics when they first appeared from the Portland music scene in 2002, having been discovered by press darling Ben Gibbard and inclined toward playing a stripped bare approximation of hardcore punk rock with some playful overtones characteristic of the Pacific Northwest twee scene that had just spent the ’90s dying down. Their album was lo-fi and home recorded, drawing comparisons to the eternally hip Guided By Voices, while their second album was recorded in a professional studio and thus marked a notable increase in production values and chops, but little in the ways of altering the sound.

Then came The Thermals’ big attention-getter, 2006’s The Body, The Blood, The Machine, an album that got a good deal of college radio airplay and more publication space (and praise) than the group ever achieved prior. Featuring a cartoon cover of a shades-wearing Jesus Christ standing happily in front of a decimated earth, the album was most ambitious, attempting to tackle issues of spirituality while railing against the Iraq war and the religious right. It made many top ten lists that year, but why wouldn’t it? It was a hip record that appropriated musical styling that critics and college rock aficionados were already predisposed to like, all the while parroting the usual anti-Bush, leftist ideology that was still a gaping wound in the wake of Georgie Boy’s re-election.

From about 2003-2006, everyone and their mother was making music that was either explicitly political or with rather obvious political overtones. Lord knows, you couldn’t lick your chin without bumping into a justice-minded musician with plenty of political rhetoric and a label willing to publish their record with forty plus minutes full of it. That’s all well and good. I support a healthy political consciousness in music. Unfortunately, none of it really amounted to much artistically because everyone seemed to be hitting the same bullet points with little to no imagination; we are a dumb society of sheep led by an evil malevolent leader, hellbent on spreading religious fascism with military force and the pirate flag of democracy. Of course, no one really got too upset over any of this, since most of the music was merely preaching to the converted and, quite honestly, only heard by people who needed it to reinforce their own values, much like those on the other side did their damnedest to make those ridiculous “boot in your ass” and “if you don’t like it, get the hell out” songs popular.

This is the era that the Thermals came about in and thus The Body, The Blood, The Machine, despite the timelessness of the issues and the fact that 2006 wasn’t very long ago, seems almost dated in its zealotry. Nowadays, since we have a President that the youth/hipster crowd seems to like (though, make no mistake, things are still pretty shitty all around), many performers have predictably retreated into making the usual “more personal records” humdrum. Divorced from the fervor that drove their last record, The Thermals return with Now We Can See, an album essentially solid for what the band does but lackluster on the whole. The lyrics are appropriately oblique and well-formed, but musically, the majority of the album amounts to the usual regurgitated garage rock with nearly all the spit and polish of your average Strokes album.

Creatively, not much goes on aside from the usual hard ‘n’ fast. “When I Died” uses the anthemic riff to the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” (or, if you don’t listen to music from before 2001, R.E.M.’s “Supernatural Superserious”) to sing about nuclear annihilation, while the closing “You Dissolve” (the subject matter doesn’t expand much further than the title) is yet another entry in a long tradition of “Louie, Louie” approximations. Elsewhere, the songs are too faceless to really even place, though the feeling soon begins to set in that the same power chords and zippy 4/4 timing have easily run its course.

Lyrically, singer Hutch Harris deals with some interesting concepts; “Liquid In, Liquid Out” plays with the idea of man as a mere machine for manure, “How We Fade” is a romantic song about longing from a death bed, and “When We Were Alive” betrays a palpable sense of loss. Others simply try to take an emotion and run with it, such as “Call Out Your Name,” (the exuberance of love) and “When I Was Afraid” (anxiety), but don’t really achieve much due to Harris’ histrionic-free “regular guy with the occasional Conor Oberst-ism” delivery. Still more like “We Were Sick” are too vague to be the anthems they want to be (he could be singing about kids with mono for all we know).

The top of the heap comes smack in the middle. The title track is a fairly hooky, radio friendly version of the Thermals’ usual, lyrically pulling a 2001: A Space Odyssey and going back to man’s primitive roots. “At the Bottom of the Sea” is a fairly generic title for an indie rock love ballad (it seems to be a pretty popular image), but manages to be a fairly sublime Velvet Underground rethread, calling to mind the slow and pretty songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Ocean.” To their credit, the Thermals have written a mighty fine song in that style, invoking a less cold Luna with its trippy repetition, jangly guitars, and vaguely psychedelic lyrics.

Still, the majority of Now We Can See doesn’t amount to more than a generic splash of hipster punk that’s low on musical creativity and, more often than not, doesn’t have all that much to say. Whatever potential the Thermals may have had earlier seems somewhat squandered here as they’ve simply repeated a formula with less success, never mind about that formula already having been beaten to death in the first place. Some may still lap this up because all the old elements are still in place (fast tempos, playful vocals, existential angst), but I can’t help but feel that everyone else seems to be writing these same songs, the only difference being that everyone else isn’t cool yet.

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Tagged as: garage rock, Punk

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