Bjork - Biophilia
dc Talk - Jesus Freak
Frou Frou - Details
Incubus - Morning View
Wendy Matthews - Emigre
Wendy Matthews - Beautiful View
Joni Mitchell - Dog Eat Dog
Radiohead - Kid A
Something for Kate - Echolalia
Something for Kate - Desert Lights
Thrice - Alchemy Index
Thrice - Major/Minor
Suzanne Vega - Tried and True
Megan Washington - There There
Rachael Yamagata - Happenstance
Thom Yorke - Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
"Tried and True" seems rather apt, because I'm not being all that adventurous lately. Although, the Thom Yorke, Megan Washington and one of the Thrice albums are all fairly recent additions to the collection. Also, daring to tackle Biophilia again was slightly adventurous, but sadly it continued to feel like a couple of fine songs placed together with a number of skeletal outlines of songs.
The album I probably paid most attention to in January was Major/Minor. I've never really talked about Thrice much in the context of The Alchemy Index, and I'm still not going to talk about The Alchemy Index. Well, not much anyway.
Thrice is a somewhat fascinating band to me. First of all, they operate in a genre that I wouldn't consider of much interest, or at least that's where they started. Their first couple of albums of punk-hardcore-something-or-other just sound like a lot of noise to me. But they had that one key ingredient of truly interesting musicians: restlessness. A desire to explore and try new things.
By album 4, Vheissu, they were distinctly experimenting, and on the 5th album The Alchemy Index they were basically experimenting in as many ways as possible all at once (more later!). The last two albums after that, though, seem to be a case of a band that has learnt what it wants to know and is returning with the lessons.
Major/Minor, which appears likely to be the last Thrice album for a considerable time if not forever, is an album of pretty straight-forward rock. What that statement hides, though, is that it actually takes a lot of damn hard work to make a piece of music sound straightforward without it also sounding utterly dull.
And Thrice have pretty much learnt the trick over the course of their career. These songs consistently have just the right amount of aural interest, of light and shade, of changes in instrumentation and volume to keep things fresh.
And then there's the other thing I keep finding fascinating: the lyrics.
Now let me say straight up that I don't think that Dustin Kensrue is a lyrical genius of the first order. There are times when the lyrics get a bit clunky. But often they're good, and what arouses my interest is how often they are based on the Bible. We're not talking about dry quotation here, like some of the unimaginative choruses you might encounter in a modern church. More often, Kensrue weaves together a wealth of references, in a way that won't necessarily sound very 'churchy' to a listener who is less Bible-literate but will grab the attention of anyone who knows where the references come from.
Take 'Cataracts', in context probably my favourite song on Major/Minor. At the very least, it lifts material from Jesus' parable of The Sower and two of the more famous passages from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. (Lyrics are reproduced on Youtube underneath the video, if you can't get them behind the squalling guitars.)
And then there's 'Blinded', which is perhaps my second-favourite song on the album. There's an obvious reference to whitewashed tombs, but it took several listens to the song before it hit me that, in all probability, the song is actually a description of the conversion of Saint Paul.
That's pretty literate stuff for what at first glance might seem like a fairly straightforward rock song.
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