From the opening moment of Thank You’s Terrible Two, it’s clear that the Baltimore band makes music that’s anything but conventional. Like the latest effort from their labelmates Boredoms, Terrible Two is built on frenetic tribal drumming and takes more of a textural approach then it does traditional song form or conventional melodies. Where the Boredoms’ Super Roots 9 was built on minimalist and hypnotic blocks of sound, however, Thank You’s music has the sound of raw, instrumental punk rock: garage-style production, schizophrenic passages of distorted tremolo guitar, and distant vocal shouts and moans twisted through guitar pedals.
The album flows as an exhilarating stream-of-consciousness piece of music, jarred with abrupt textural and tempo changes. Halfway through “Embryo Imbroglio,” the song shifts from a messy guitar freak-out to a breakdown of thumping bass, drums, and reverb-y metallic sounds alternating between the speakers. The mid-section of “Self With Yourself” layers polytonal film-noir organ over rolling tom drums before returning to the punk rock sound that opened the song. “Pregnant Friends” features wordless vocal harmonies moaning over sustained electric organ and strummed acoustic guitar before breaking down to a spastic guitar distortion meltdown. In the song’s outro, an atonal chorus of ahhs twists over a low-end analog synth.
The album’s production sound is wonderfully lo-fi, thanks to some awesome recording by Yeasayer engineer J. Robbins and mixing by Chris Coady, who’s worked with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV on the Radio. Like the music itself, the production is raw, incorporating a variety of found sounds, compressed cymbals, and plenty of reverb-y hisses and pops. At certain points, it sounds as if the drums and vocals were recorded in the back of a cathedral and the guitar through faulty cables and an overheated tube amp. The result is an occasionally grating, though always intriguing, sound that’s simultaneously distant and in your face.
Terrible Two sounds like a couple of sweaty guys in a basement obsessed with making high-energy punk rock and weird noises. It’s loud. It’s messy and all over the place. It’s great.
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