The Thermals “Here’s Your Future”
Hutch & Kathy “Infinite Loop”

The Body, The Blood, The Machine, this year’s release from Portland punks the Thermals, is easily one of my favorite records of 2006, maybe the best the band has produced. While this is something like the billionth blog to big up these guys, I guess I’ll go ahead and share the opener off that disc, part one in a prolonged paranoid nightmare about America as a theocracy.

(That’ll never happen now, right?)

“Here’s Your Future” takes a couple Bible stories, Noah building the ark and Jesus headed to the cross, and remixes them–humanizing and somehow modernizing the characters. As doubts and fears spin out, we’re presented the typical biblical scene, G-d addresses folks directly and asks them to do crazy things, and confronted with its implications in today’s world.

(What happens when an influential voting bloc thinks it has a direct line to the higher power? When our leaders do?)

The vocals’ insistent rant, the fury of the three-piece rock delivery, they amplify the weary, questioning spirit of this tune.

(I wasn’t surprised to discover that the Thermals, like me, are disenchanted products of a Catholic education.)

I wanted to go somewhere else with this, though. Or maybe back to an earlier point–the fleshing out of these mythic personae. Singer/guitarist Hutch Harris imbues cowed Noah, tortured Jesus, with real feelings, mixed feelings, the stuff of humanity.

I’ve posited before the importance of The Moment in pop songs. There are certain galvanizing parts in certain songs where everything comes together. These are usually dramatic shifts or points of extreme release, like a sonic analog to the sun bursting through clouds.

(This might tip my hand as a singer-songwriter-loving fuddy-duddy, but the examples that most readily come to mind are the part in Neil Young’s “Old Man” when James Taylor’s banjo playing ambles through the mix, and the onslaught of the reverbed Drumz of God against the swirling mellotron in “Everything Means Nothing To Me” by Elliott Smith.)

Which is the long way of getting to the spot around 1:40 into “Here’s Your Future” where Harris gives voice to a reluctant Messiah answering his dad’s call: “I will, but Dad, I’m afraid!” The extreme empathy in this line, intersecting with a rhythm section drop-out and some flaying guitar work… I call that The Moment.

(This is the part where the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end for a fraction of a second every time I listen to the song. Heavy stuff, no?)

To either accentuate, or give you a break from, the heavitude of theme and performance in Thermals 06, I thought it’d be nice to also share a snapshot of cuter days from the band’s principals. “Infinite Loop” is a shining example of indie pop, off the 2002 self-titled record from Harris’ and Thermals bassist Kathy Foster’s earlier team incarnation (…wait for it…), Hutch & Kathy.

The song’s a cupid arrow connecting with my music geek heart. You’ve got strummy acoustics and boy-gurl vox risking hyperbole in praise of love. Here the road of a relationship is like the highways to a touring band, and being together is a sweet labor of love that requires practice, like the song you play over and over.

The line about “yr spine showing through yr sweater” always pops out, both for the wink at an old school indie rock signifier and as a treat for those of us who worship at the Church of the Small But Telling Detail. Then the writing of the song is referenced in the song, a po-mo wrecking ball through the fourth wall.

(Not bad for an unassuming little pop ditty.)

TBTBTM at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
H&K at Newbury Comics.

Pernice Brothers “Grudge F*** (2006)”
Scud Mountain Boys “Grudge ****”

Stop the presses! Two days in a row with 2006 content! (Well, sorta.)

Massachusetts native Joe Pernice has a smooth and increasingly smoky voice that recalls the Zombies’ Colin Blunstone at time, a bad attitude and a gift for insidiuosly catchy melodies.

In the mid-90s he applied these tools to a usually mellow country-rock, in retrospect really eschewing the “alt,” as frontman of the Scud Mountain Boys. His songs fleshed out a sublimely fatalistic vision of low-rent, working-class living that was in some ways uniquely Western Mass. On that group’s great final record, 1996’s Massachusetts, Pernice uncorked what felt like his pinnacle song, “Grudge Fuck.” (I mean, let’s speak plainly here.)

The Scuds took a pristine AM gold melody that could’ve been the result of some sort of Jim Croce-Bread collaboration, and ran it through a dive-bar last-call atmosphere worthy of early Waits. And indeed, it’s a late night tale: the song’s speaker lays down a pretty heavy rap of self-loathing: he’s sloshed, he’s stoned, he’s pleading for his old girlfriend to let him come over.

Some of us may have been to a place like this at one time or another. C’mon, baby. Remember the good times? Whatever happened to us? We’re friends. Friends can cuddle, right? Do you think, just one last time… (I’ll equivocate slightly and at least admit to this song’s setting off the fake nostalgia bells that I so often seek to ring.)

It’s such a pathetic ploy for ex sex–we know he’s lying when he says, “I swear to G-d I’d never touch you,” because after all, “I’d give anything to make it with you/just one more time”–that it crosses over, in and of itself, to bleakest dark comedy.

Ah, but the plot thickens. You see, the song’s not called “Mercy Fuck,” which is what he’s asking for. The implications of the title are postively sinister–namely, it’s all a ruse, this isn’t about lonely desperation but something closer to calculated revenge.

I told you Joe Pernice has a bad attitude.

On last months’s new release Live a Little, the Pernice Brothers, Joe’s going concern in more of a classic pop style, close out with a ten-year anniversary revisit of “Grudge Fuck.” This is clearly designed to: (a) revive the tune, (b) acknowledge it as maybe Joe’s best song, indeed one of the few Scud tunes to carry over to the Bros’ live set, (c) make me say, “Holy shit, I’m getting old,” or (d) all of the above.

The revision is slight. You can just barely hear the cigarettes consumed between 1996 and 2006 sexing up Joe’s vocal chords. The piano’s tinnier, the bass incrementally showier. There’s strings now, but not too sappy, and backing vocals, perhaps a little too sappy.

What’s interesting is that Joe’s muse has moved slightly upscale over the last decade. His chosen subject has moved on from van drunks and scratch ticket addicts to clock-watching temps and dayjob wage slaves in monkey suits. He’s a little more Moz/Elvis C. and a little less, well, mopey version of Croce/Bread. “Grudge Fuck” still carries with it that whiff of the downscale days, so it’s a tad–just a tad, really–out of step with his newer work as a result.

But here’s the thing: my initial reaction to a new Pernice record, at least after the Bros.’ ridiculously poppy and upbeat (sounding) second effort, The World Won’t End, is usually muted. His grasp of pop songwriting craft is so complete that I need to let the discs grow on me. It’s almost too much beauty. I need to give the songs time, need to mine the veins where I’ll find personal resonance.

So, in terms of instant gratification, it’s nice to pick up a Pernice disc and know right away that I love one of the songs on it.

Live a Little at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
Massachusetts at Target. (and at iTunes.)