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Album Review: The Thermals – Now We Can See (Kill Rock Stars)

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MP3: The Thermals – Misfit (Wipers cover) from Datrotter Session

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MP3: The Thermals – Back to the Sea from 2006′s The Body, The Blood, The Machine

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MP3: The Thermals – Now We Can See from 2009′s Now We Can See

The Thermals (Wiki) are probably one of my favorite projects to come out of the Portland scene in the past decade, and definitively made a case for pop-punk that matters.

In just their first 2 years, they released as many self-recorded albums (More Parts Per Million & Fuckin’ A), sprint-length and packed with the lowest-fidelity punk you could dream of.  Guitars shredding through your speakers like razors, rusty shards of metal being shaken up in a tin can.  The result was exhilirating, almost exhausting in purity.  A complete embrace of the founding elements of punk music: simple, short songs, high volume and distortion, and a DIY ethos.

Then along comes 2006′s absolutely remarkable The Body, The Blood, The Machine, a relatively lush and glorious pop-punk album, their lo-fi sound seemed to be a bygone era, and the Thermals brought us a whole different kind of apocalypse than we expected.  Continuing the trend of sylistic pairs of albums with their latest, Now We Can See (a sequel to the events and ideas from TBTBTM), Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster have packed another record to the gills with tight and slick gems.

So what do the Thermals bring to the table that sets them apart from their obvious forebears, groups like the Ramones, that similarly played simple, ultra-hooky pop-infused punk?

Lyrics.

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