To identify Thank You Scientist as a Progressive Rock band is slightly reductive and not entirely accurate. The New Jersey septet certainly plays a vibrant and cerebral brand of Rock that is progressive in attitude and execution, but not Prog as espoused by musical entities that wallow in bloated and self-indulgent 20-minute, Classical-adjacent suites with science fiction/sword and sorcery/historically significant/wizard-witch-warlock themes.
Thank You Scientist hews closer to the absurdist humor and eclectic Rock orchestrations of Frank Zappa and the populist runic translations of Phish, with flashes of contemporary Pop, Rock and Jazz woven into the fabric of the soundtrack. And while TYS generally pushes its songs into the 6-to-9-minute mark, there is a dynamism and sense of flow to the longer songs that make them engaging and compelling from start to finish. “FXMLDR” (as in the X-Files agent minus vowels) is the group’s first track released from its upcoming third album, Terraformer, and it clocks in at a brisk and atypical-for-a-single 8 minutes.
The seeds of Thank You Scientist were planted at Montclair State University’s music program over a decade ago with guitarist Tom Monda, saxophonist Ellis Jasenovic and trumpeter Andrew Digrius bonding over a mutual love of Zappa, Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Beatles and Harry Nilsson. The initial lineup of TYS solidified in 2009 with the additions of lead vocalist Salvatore Marrano, bassist Greg Colacino, violinist Ben Karas and drummer Odin Alvarez. The band self-released its 2011 debut EP, The Perils of Time Travel, and its full-length follow-up, 2012’s Maps of Non-Existent Places, which caught the ear of Coheed and Cambria frontman Claudio Sanchez, who made TYS the first signing to his Evil Ink label.
In 2015, Colacino left TYS and was replaced by Cody McCorry, who appeared on the band’s sophomore album, 2016’s Stranger Heads Prevail. The subsequent grueling tour triggered the exits of Alvarez, Jasenovic and Digrius, who were replaced by drummer Joe Fadem, saxophonist Sam Greenfield and trumpeter Joe Gullace.
That’s the lineup that recorded the 90-minute Terraformer, which will be released this Friday and was teased on the TYS website with a bizarre video that wouldn’t have looked out of place on John C. Reilly’s faux public access show, Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule. The video revealed a handful of Terraformer’s predictably humorous song titles, including “I Need to Check My E-Mail, Is Dot Com Working?”
Thank You Scientist is Progressive Rock for people who don’t like Prog and whimsically serious jams for people who don’t like Jam bands.
The group performs Sunday at Newport’s Southgate House Revival with Bent Knee. Click here for tickets/more show info.
This article appears in Jun 12-19, 2019.