Kill Rock Stars
Over four albums The Thermals have stripped punk-inspired indie rock back as far as they possibly can. Longtime partners Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster shamelessly revel in the straightforward joy that only the three-chord verse-chorus-verse format could provide.
Despite that surface simplicity Now I Can See shows remarkable depth. Harris’s stream-of-consciousness approach is more literal than ever — his lyrics are awash in water imagery. He crawls into the sea on album opener “When I Died” and spends the rest of the album drowning and dissolving. His clever use of pronouns can single him out for accusations (“I Let it Go” and “I Called Out Your Name”) or make listeners complicit (“We Were Sick” or “When We Were Alive”). He uses repetition to his advantage checking his own lyrics and melodies to paint a portrait of a relationship that is devolving with Darwinian inevitability. Now I Can See may not have the overarching brilliance of The Thermals’ 2006 concept album The Body the Blood the Machine but you have to give the band credit. For an album so clinically dire it’s a shameless rocker.
