"Laser Art '70" by Ralph Morse originally published in LIFE Magazine, 1970
The Thermals have a new album coming out this spring on Kill Rock Stars, and you can download the first single here. It's great - a bouncy upbeat song that loses nothing by stepping back a little from the Thermals' usual high-energy pop-punk. I have been a fan of the Thermals for a while, and their last album The Body The Blood The Machine was one of my favorites of 2006, but this new one may be even better. Watching the Thermals find ways to do new things with their simple formula has been interesting, and they've found a surprising number of ways to vary their sound without losing the plot. But the band's frontman and songwriter, Hutch Harris, didn't always hew so closely to the punk style.
Before the Thermals formed, he and long-time collaborator Kathy Foster recorded twee pop under the name Hutch & Kathy. And before that Harris had a solo recording project called Urban Legends - I think the Urban Legends album was Harris' first full-length release. With shoegaze-influenced guitars and his yelping voice purposefully obscured in the mix, the sound was described by Punk Planet as a mix of Built To Spill and Superchunk. Long out of print, the original Urban Legends record may become a collectible at some point, although I found my copy for two bucks a couple years ago. "Civilians' Countdown" is one of the record's best songs, and the one that sounds the least like the Thermals. It features Matt Bianchi of Her Space Holiday on keyboards.
"Civilians' Countdown" by Urban Legends
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