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http://www.senbaltimore.com/blogs/agt/agt_reviews/throwback-review-thursday---war-all-the-time.shtmlThrowback Review: Thursday - War All The Time
Take a step back to 2003 and recall the major label debut by Thursday. Love them or hate them, these guys wrote the book on screamo.
Every once in a while, I like to look back at an album that has stood the test of time. A relatively short test (just four years in this case), but Thursday's War All The Time (which shares a title with a Charles Bukowski book) is still the essential screamo record for me, perhaps second only to its predecessor, Full Collapse. And as a post-hardcore record in the midst of a plagued subgenre, to critics Thursday either are the best band in their little community or the least terrible one.
The first album by the band on Island Records, War is revered by many, and dismissed by others as doomed to be the album that came after Full Collapse, which featured "Understanding in a Car Crash". That, and the Five Stories Falling EP which is dominated by "Jet Black New Year." When you're (a) leaving an "indie" label in the midst of a bad breakup and (b) trying to follow up one of the best albums in your genre, you've got your work cut out for you.
If you're old enough to have a job that requires a shirt with a collar, "For The Workforce, Drowning" is intensity in 6/8 as you ride the elevator to the 17th floor. If you can't sympathize with "just keep making copies, of copies, of copies . . ." just look at your dad in his short sleeve shirt and tie and the hollow look of despair in his eyes, and you'll be close to understanding Geoff Rickly's message when he says "these ties strangle our necks." Must be easy for someone from suburban New Jersey to write about the daily grind.
"Division St." enters with an ominous bass line and walks down Division Street, where the lights are broken and broken glass litters the ground, breaking down and banging out before the album's lead single, "Signals Over The Air", a twisted love tale in the vein of one Robert Smith. The easy hook of this tune made it an easy choice for Island to unleash Thursday on the mainstream.
Thursday is musically a fascinatingly technical band, employing chops taught at some elite Top Gun for musicians to own songs like "M. Shepard," written for Matthew Shepard who was killed and tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyoming for being gay ("you tie us all up and leave us outside"). This track is evidence of lead singer Rickly's lyrical proficiency. So ambiguous and poetic is he that I'm willing to forgive his whiny side.
Say what you will about emo and screamo bands: Thursday opened the Pandora's box that allows copycats to sell a few records before getting laughed back into the underground. In the way that Seattle broke grunge, which died prematurely with Kurt Cobain, thus preserving its legacy, New Jersey broke screamo but didn't manage to kill it early enough to preserve the integrity that Thursday brought back on the follow-up to War All The Time, A City By The Light Divided.
Thursday's latest release, Kill The House Lights (Victory Records), is a CD/DVD combination featuring a documentary, concert footage, as well as B-sides, outtakes, and three new songs.