by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Where exactly does your threshold for punishment lie? If often seems as though Thank intend to find out, their music abrasive, throbbing, and entirely consuming, but there’s a balance. The Leeds based quartet also write some of the sharpest hooks you’ll ever come across. The band’s incessant sense of humor is viciously biting, running rampant through their songs like one of those chattering teeth wind-up toys. Trolling the trolls in a sense, there’s a good nature to the sicko mentality of their sordid noise rock, they’re consistently punching up, a voice for the sensible among us delivered with the confidence of a solid gold madman. I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed, the band’s second full length, is an expansion of their sound, both more patient and frantic, uglier and funnier, unnerving but plastered with a permanent smirk. Where so many others choose to play it safe, Thank come unglued, their destructive metamorphosis of raw punk and mutant disco is increasingly primal and triumphantly obnoxious.
Grating with a purpose, there’s an undeniable focus and clarity to I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed, oozing and noisy as it is. The record sounds enormous, a defining statement capable of rewiring brains as their labyrinth mix of clamoring electronics, pulsating synths, and bruising rhythms swell and dismantle. Recorded together with the band’s long time producer Rob Slater (Blacklisters, Beige Palace, Yard Act), the layers manage to sound peeled back yet impossibly dense, like stumbling through a hazy fog only to run full speed into a brick wall. By design, Thank seem to thrive in disorientation, pitting tension against dancefloor beats, the structures weaving between gluey sludge, fractured dissonance, and blistering apocalyptic disco. Regardless of which way the songs contort and thrash, the hooks remain forever in sight. This is music you can sing (err… shout like a lunatic) along to, if you feel so compelled.
Thank’s attack has a tendency to swarm at just the right moments, spitting and twitching at opportune times, keeping your senses frazzled as the sardonic lyrics delightfully nudge you back to equilibrium. In one fell swoop they’re able to give you anxiety and make you laugh, something like getting laughing gas before oral surgery. For a band that built a reputation on “Dread” (literally, an impossibly great song called “Dread”), our senses are warped and mangled in the presence of their music, aesthetically cavernous but grounded by hooks like “you’ve got no mates” and lines such as “this man’s a rude, lewd, nude dude,” that sort of feel like a kid sticking his tongue out at you on the schoolyard playground. Thank sound dangerous, their inventive brand of experimental noise rock buzzing and swarming, but it’s inherently clear that they’re having fun. Let’s not miss the point. These are indeed negative times, and they’re ripe for a piss take of the self-serious, greedy, bourgeoisie, and let us not forget those who have been irrevocably ruined by social media.
With a shift in the line-up since the release of Thoughtless Cruelty, Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe (vocals, guitar), Lewis Millward (synth, guitar), and Cameron Moitt (bass), are joined by Steve Myles (drums), his stampeding presence immediately felt on tracks like “The Spores” with it’s extended doom dirge evolving into a tornado of divergent drum fills. The band excel in a rare long-form moment, as the lyrics take on a bit of the abstract, with allusions to both The Simpsons and Black Sabbath, while the music digs forever deeper, carving into a state of menace before an atonal groove locks in and everything rattles from the rusted hinges. It’s not all tension and release though, songs like “Barely” and “Smiling Politely” take opposing approaches, the former settling into a dazzling motorik pocket with a complex but deep groove, while the latter is brilliantly detached, the jerky rhythm pushing and pulling with a dizzying determination.
Vinehill-Cliffe’s accentuated bark is fine form, like a demented preacher whose words all arrive in hysterically pointed jabs and manic outbursts. There’s a wealth to the insanity. Take lead single “Writing Out A List Of All The Names Of God,” a song that hilariously rips on the bloated egos of Sleaford Mods (“Listen up, ‘cause this is important / we’re the headliners, Sheer Mag are supporting”), references Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5” and drops gems like “patience is a virtue, wisdom is not” all in the inane space of one song. Over the alien electronic framework of “Woke Fraiser” Vinehill-Cliffe takes aim at idiots with an internet connection for whom “doing your own research means listening to me skim-reading the first three results on Google” before cynically suggesting “bad news, your credit card details are now woke, and you should send them to me for safe disposal”. It’s vengeance and spite delivered with an enormous grin, poking and prodding at those who will never know or realize they’ve been poked and prodded.
I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed is both an assault musically and mentally, simultaneously taking punches as it swings for the fences. Thank’s music proves that noise rock can be expansive, pushing the envelope of what is possible, their carnage ever accessible due to deranged and unlikely hooks paired with memorable lines like “I’ve got a sickness, it’s called Sad Little Guy’s Disease” and “my body is full of blood, and my brain is full of bees / I am a professional child”. The music is punishing but digestible. They groove, they pillage, they peel back and erupt. It’s an impeccably nuanced record in a genre that rarely rewards dynamics, a collision of the brash and brainy, hammering the pieces together in the band’s own unique way. Thank do not suffer fools gladly, and we’re all the better for it.