So here’s a confession. Until Kill Rock Stars sent me a demo copy for The Thermals’ new album, Personal Life, last week or so, I’d never heard the band. I think part of me always sort of dismissed them because they were such a popular band with losers who only listened to bands so that they could brag about it. I mean, Mark over at The Days of Lore totally loves The Thermals, and that guy wouldn’t know what music was if it weren’t for girls. Seriously, have you ever read his blog? More like The Please Be My Girlfriend of Lore.
I kid. I kid. Mark is the man.
At any rate, I decided that instead of familiarizing myself with the rest of The Thermals’ catalog, I would write an uninformed review, then go back and check out their other shit, and write an informed review if I feel like my attitude has changed. Pretty spiffy, eh? I thought of it myself!
Personal Life reminds me a lot of Rainer Maria‘s wicked excellent album ‘Long Knives Drawn.’ It’s got a simple, sincere, heartfelt tone. It’s the sort of album that a band writes after a traumatic experience, where they have to cut through the bullshit and say what’s really on their mind. It’s not a necessarily unhappy tone either. I remember spending a long time dancing a little happy dance around my dorm room to the sounds of Long Knives Drawn when I first got it. Personal Life is no less a wonderful little happy dance record. At the same time, it’s not happy in a mindless sort of way. It’s a wise, mature, and desperate sort of happy that comes from someone who knows what pain is. A really awesome noise project from Portland, OR called Argumentix put out a CD once called ‘Sing Yer Life,’ which I think might be the best way of describing a record like Personal Life. Imagine someone so overcome with such profound, exasperated emotions that they have to scream it out to whoever will hear it, and now give them a great voice, and a band to back them up. That’s Personal Life. If you’ve recently gone through a divorce or breakup, if your parents are separating, if you just lost a pet, if you feel like you just can’t fucking take it anymore, this is your album.
Pingback: Quick Kix | Ve