Recovering Catholics — with The Body The Blood The Machine The Thermals have become the holy trinit
The Thermals use religion to take a political stand
When Portland Oregon’s The Thermals burst on the scene in 2003 with their Sub Pop debut More Parts Per Million it was a lo-fi masterpiece. Recorded on a ghetto blaster in front man Hutch Harris’s kitchen stripped down song structure met head-on with stream-of-consciousness lyrics to create a static blast of punk rock.
With help from Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla as producer the followup Fuckin’ A was more refined sonically but still featured the band’s trademark explosive energy. Despite those auspicious beginnings nothing could prepare audiences for 2006’s The Body The Blood The Machine .
Adorned with an image of the messiah and loaded with Old Testament references Harris and bassist Kathy Foster brought their Christian upbringing to the fore. The lead-off track “Here’s Your Future” simmers with evangelical organ before blasting off with a rocker that paints God as a vengeful dictator. Three seconds into the album’s second track “I Might Need You to Kill” and biblical plagues are already raining from the sky. It’s the kind of record that could easily get the religious right in a twist. As Harris explains though The Thermals just aren’t a big enough band to engender that kind of controversy.
“There have been a couple of nasty e-mails from people who ended up with a song accidentally” he says. “There was this guy who wrote to us and he was like ‘I’m a punk rocker but I love Jesus and I fuckin’ hate you guys ’cause you guys are just slamming Christianity’ which it wasn’t. The record wasn’t supposed to be taken as a slam. It’s more of a political record.”
Certainly religion can politicize people and with The Thermals blending Catholic imagery and punk rock esthetic The Body The Blood The Machine does that. However in Harris’s mind this state of the union political address doesn’t have its crosshairs aimed at God but at someone with a God complex.
“The fear for the country was that (George W.) Bush was going to keep fucking it up and making things worse and worse” says Harris. “For the record… I wanted to use my fear to fantasize in a real paranoid way — just imagine how badly could he really fuck it up. How much worse could things get if they continued along the same path we saw him going down. So really it was imagining how much more afraid I could be than I actually was at the time.”
The result is an impressive bit of songwriting that works on the head as well as it does the feet. There may not be a narrative that runs through the whole album but the paranoid thematic and Catholic iconography is certainly cohesive. It’s a huge step forward for a band that was known for stream-of-consciousness delivery and it led to The Body The Blood The Machine being labelled a concept record. As it turns out that’s a label that Harris isn’t comfortable with.
“I was excited to (call it that) when we did it but when I started talking about it in that way it started sounding really lame. I started feeling stupid about it” he says. “I try not to take what we do too seriously…. When I start thinking about the term concept record I start thinking about bands like Yes and Genesis and stuff. We’re really the opposite of what those bands were and did. But then I came around. I feel the same way about the word punk rock.”
Despite the gloom-and-doom fear that inspired the album and the pressure that any religious reference places on a work of art it’s important to note that The Body The Blood The Machine isn’t dour in the least. As a self-described recovering Catholic Harris knows that participation out of obligation is about as much fun as Sunday mass with a boring priest. To that end the album is witty satirical and sarcastic. While snickering is never allowed in church this album certainly has a great sense of humour.
“Usually I wish there was more” says Harris. “We’re writing the next record right now and that has been on my mind more than ever — keeping a lot of humour in it because I think it’s really important. I’m glad when people realize that there is a lot of sarcasm and humour in the last record because if you just take it as point-blank serious and really meaning what it says I think it’s a lot less interesting.”
