Thursday is a band that’s always had an appetite for the ambitious. The 12-year-old New Brunswick, N.J., Post-Hardcore sextet has gracefully ascended from packing basements and bars to headlining Bogart’s this week as part of the formidable Taste of Chaos Tour.
While the sextet’s music oeuvre relies on intense shouting and a volatile clamor of guitars, they have proudly championed creativity and analysis. Their songs paint vivid portraits of subjects like life-changing automobile accidents (“Understanding in a Car Crash”), grisly hate crimes (“M. Shepard”) and the world crumbling in the chaos of Armageddon (“Paris in Flames”). MTV once banned a video for the title track of 2003 LP War All the Time from the station’s airwaves for being too provocative (the clip featured a fake news ticker running claims like “White flags seen burning at daybreak”). They often use literary figures like the notorious Charles Bukowski for inspiration. Rather than using generic Hard Rock imagery like skulls or fire, Thursday’s logos are a chevron and a stylized dove.
Common Existence, the band’s latest full-length, released this month on their new label, Epitaph Records, is appropriately just as daring. The cover is a stark photograph of two nuns from behind. The CD booklet is inscribed with a passage by Chilean poet Roberto Bolaño and the album is dedicated in part to recently deceased writer David Foster Wallace.
Thursday’s sonic output itself is a contemplative complement. Opener “Resuscitation of a Dead Man” launches with a wild cry of “Ambulance, let me in” as instruments cave in violently from every direction. “Friends in the Armed Forces” is a protest song of incredible might, passionately mourning the casualties of unlawful wars. Keeping 2006’s A City By the Light Divided in mind, this is much more of a return to the group’s original form. In the words of the guitarist Tom Keeley, it was about “sculpting the colors and sculpting the sounds that were the more experimental (sounds of A City). For us, what that inevitably ends up with is a heavier record. We’re marrying our past with a distant look into the future.”
(Buy tickets, check out performance times and find nearby bars and restaurants here.)
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 3, 2009.
