In Stores Now: Personal Life by the Thermals

Czechoslovakian matchbook label promoting fire protection, 1970

Every time the Thermals come out with a new record, I hope that it will blow me away completely as the obvious "album of the year". Of course, what I really want is a time machine that allows me to go back to 2006 and start this blog a couple years early for the sole purpose of prematurely hailing the Thermals' The Body, The Blood, The Machine as the best album of the decade. I love that album a lot, but I need to come to grips with the fact that the Thermals aren't going to recreate it, and I actually don't really want them to. What they're doing now is just as interesting, if it doesn't hit quite as hard as the "peak vitriol" the band was working with in 2006. After albums about politics, religion, and death, the Thermals (a band built around the relationship between guitarist Hutch Harris and bassist Kathy Foster) has finally made a "relationship" record.

Hutch and Kathy (as they called themselves when they were performing as a pre-Thermals twee-acoustic duo) are a cute couple, but Personal Life is NOT a cutesy record. The songs have titles like "I Don't Believe You" and "Never Listen to Me", making it seem at times like a breakup record, but the theme of the record seems to be the dark corners that exist in functioning (or dysfunctioning) relationships. These songs are desperate, creepy love songs of people clinging to each other - manipulation, mind games, and weird power dynamics are in the spotlight. It makes Personal Life a much more interesting listen than a we're-happy-and-in-love album, but it's also quite dark - in a way, it's more depressing than 2009's Now We Can See, which was composed solely of 11 songs about death.

Personal Life has a distinctive sound that continues to move away from the all-out assault of the first three Thermals records, favoring Spoon-style minimalist, rhythm-heavy rock structures. Foster's bass is the most powerful sound on the record, with the guitar embellishing the arrangements with power chords and baritone-range solos for variety. Harris's vocals are strong and doubled with Foster's on the best tracks, like "Never Listen to Me". Like most of the tracks on Personal Life, the second single from the record is best described as "deceptively simple", making a lot out of a few elements. It's not a balls-to-the-wall barn-burner, but there's a lot of power in its chugging rhythm and simmering, insistent vocal line.

Like most just-for-fun side projects that turn into main gigs, the Thermals seem like they should have painted themselves into a corner ages ago (around the time of The Body, the Blood, the Machine), but they're finding ways to make each album a compelling, theme-specific work.

"Never Listen to Me" by the Thermals