Why aren't "post-pop-punks" The Thermals hotter?
Source: By Joshua Ostroff
Posted: 11/07/07 1:16PM
Filed Under: Music
Being a music critic often means championing obscure bands with admittedly little chance of mainstream success. But then there are bands who make accessible records that should, by all weights and measures, be absolutely huge and yet continue to toil in obscurity.
The Thermals, a sarcastically self-declared “post-pop-punk” trio from Portland fresh off their first cross-Canada tour, are just such an unfairly, under-the-radar indie band. Their recent long-awaited performance at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern was positively blistering—you wonder how three people and three chords can make so much noise sound so damn melodic—but though the crowd was undeniably enthusiastic, it was also relatively sparse.
“I don’t know why,” says singer/guitarist Hutch Harris, who recorded the album with partner/bassist Kathy Foster and producer Brendan Canty (of Fugazi fame). “I mean Pitchfork gave it a lot of love, Spin gave it love but I don’t know. I feel like it has nothing really to do with the content [though] I don’t think politics really sells records.”
Anthemic pop-punk does sell, but The Thermals’ 2006 masterpiece 'The Body, The Blood, The Machine' mixed its raw-but-catchy sonics with an emotionally-stirring socio-political concept album about living in a fascist-Christian state with an ever-rumbling war machine.
You thought Green Day was ballsy for calling Bush an idiot? Well, wait ‘til you hear “I Might Need You To Kill” or “Power Doesn’t Run on Nothing.” Maybe the problem was the “concept album” stigma which, Harris admits, still “makes you think of really long Prog-rock songs from the 70s.” But more likely the group’s gloves-off take on religion proved the biggest roadblock.
“For us it was more interesting to talk about religion. What we have is a government propped up by the Christian right, getting a lot of money from the Christian right and fighting for a lot of issues for the Christian right,” Harris says, citing gay marriage, abortion rights and stem cell research.
“I think it’s mostly a political record but all the imagery and lyrics are religious or use religious imagery and references. But we got a lot of good responses from Christians who understood the record and knew it wasn’t just bashing Christianity. People who said they felt the same way, or, as Christians, felt really misrepresented by Bush or felt [certain] people in the Church kind of ruined the name for everyone else.”
It’s a bold, albeit not entirely unexpected perspective, especially coming from folks from Portland, a bastion of left-wing thinking that their bio describe as “a virtual working model of a modern-day utopia, replete with clean air, well-groomed-but-greasy hair, and cheap rents for (hardly) starving artists.”
“Portland is a little bubble, for sure. It definitely is. It’s a good place to come home to [and] it’s really good for music,,” Harris says. “There are a lot of bands that moved here—like us, like Modest Mouse.”
Though Harris makes clear that the album’s loose storyline is intended as “fiction,” he’s not pulling themes completely out of thin air. “If you’re really pessimistic about it you could say that, well, things have always been really bad for mankind and probably will continue to be. Like in [George Orwell’s novel] ‘1984.’ You look at London and cameras are everywhere—it’s f--king incredible, almost like people took his ideas.”
Of course, back when 'The Body, The Blood, The Machine' was first written, criticism of the Iraq war was still verboten, Bush wasn’t yet languishing in the polls and anti-gay Senator Larry Craig hadn’t been busted soliciting bathroom sex. Still, even with a presidential election next year, Harris doesn’t have much hope for the future.
“Democrats are great at f--king things up. I shudder to think.”
But there is hope for music fans, at least. The Thermals have been writing with a fervour. They have about eight songs already in the can and plans to hit the studio early in the new year. And after the last album’s slow-burn, maybe this time more people will warm up to one of our generation’s smartest, strongest bands.
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