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By Brian Spero For a band that takes music as seriously as the emo/screamo outfit Thursday, recording their third album was a unique endeavor. As singer Geoff Rickly put it, "The first record has nothing influencing you. You're just like, 'Let's make some music.' The second (album) you're like, 'Man, that first one sucked. We can do so much better.'" He continued, "We got to a place that we liked our second record a lot ... so it wasn't as liberating as saying that anything that we do is going to be better than what we just did. It was hard to think about not stepping in the same ground twice." The players - Steve Pedulla (guitars), Tim Payne (bass), Tucker Rule (drums) and Tom Keeley (guitars) - constantly pushed each other to new levels while writing War All The Time, their Island Records debut, raising their sound to new heights while avoiding the traps and pitfalls that often bury originality and edge. What they achieved collectively is a volatile give and take between ultra-personal lyrics juxtaposed against powerful pulses and explosions, ultimately creating some kind of sonic call and response. Thursday's spirit, which helped move over 230,000 units of their second indie release, Full Collapse, remained, while the music evolved. Rickly called the new album "...a record of questions, but not clear questions." That's a change from past work. "I had things that had happened I wanted to think about and talk about and sort of explain to myself. I was able to use songs to explain them and have perspective on them and put them in a place where I could say, 'Now I have closure on that,'" Rickly confessed. This time around the material is more open ended and current, but no less introspective. Something Geoff called, "a scary place to go." This coming from a man who, in the past, has addressed the rape of his first girlfriend, and stabbing someone in self-defense. "On this record there's songs that there's just no way in hell I'm going to talk about," Rickly said of War. It's a dense album with glimpses into the individual experience of being alive, exemplified in the song "Division St.," which rises to a poignant moment as the drum goes into a march-like beat and the lyrics breath, "Between the footsteps I hear crickets in the trees/A silent army marching with me through a swarm of bees/A needle dragged across a record slowing down." "It's one of the things about music that's least tangible. It's the thing that I love the most about music," Rickly said, while describing how music can be evocative of something universal and moving. He continued, "Where the picture comes before the meaning of the song." On the web: www.thursday.net |
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Copyright © 2002 Mean Street Magazine, LLC |
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