This "War"'s Good For Plenty!

In 2001, New Jersey hardcore group Thursday released their second alblum Full Collapse on legandary punk label Victory Records. Although the label is hardly known for big selling bands, MTV2 and some rock stations quickly adopted the group and gave a surprising amount of airplay to their videos for Understanding In A Car Crash and Cross Out The Eyes. The record became an underground hit, and after the group became the biggest attraction on the Warped Tour without even appearing on the main stage, they decided they deserved more than Victory could give and signed a new, major-label deal with Def Jam records for their new alblum.

For all it's good points (and for all the units it sold), I wasn't entirely sure that Thursday warranted the hype they were getting after hearing their first release. To me, some tracks sounded brilliant, some were ok, and a few were just not very good. I was worried the band would be similarly uneven on this disc, but i'm glad to say that they aren't; War All The Time is far more consistently good than Full Collapse and is one of the best rock releases of the year.

WAR ALL THE TIME
1)For The Workforce, Drowning (*****)
2)Rupture And Rapture (****)
3)Division Street (****)
4)Signals Over The Air (*****)
5)Marches And Manuvers (****)
6)Asleep At The Chapel (*****)
7)This Song Brought To You By A Falling Bomb (***)
8)Steps Ascending (****)
9)War All The Time (*****)
10)M. Shepard (****)
11)Tomorrow I'll Be You (****)

The record gets off to an explosive start with For The Workforce, Drowning, a track that sets the tone very well; by the time it's over, there's no doubt that the band is getting very, very personal for this disc. It's considerably heavier than anything on the group's previous alblum Full Collapse. The traces of melody that pervade most of their music are gone, the bass rumbles like it never has before, and the guitars don't seem so much like a wall as a tidal wave as the band strums the strings. Even more surprisingly, this song features almost no hardcore screaming, but still sounds far more intense than most of their work, simply because of how impassioned singer Geoff Rickley sounds. When he reaches the chorus and sings "Please take these hands/ throw them in the river/ wash away the things they've never held!", he sounds like he wants to either cry or strangle the factory manager. Chances are most of the band's fans will feel him, yo.

The next couple of tracks are more traditional Thursday, with strong melodies backing the hardcore parts, but again the screaming has been toned down. Whereas it was a main part of the past record's vocals, this time the screamed vocals are used more as an exclamation point for the songs. I hardly even noticed it though, because Rickley's melodic vocals have definately taken a step up this time around. The "lalalalala" chorus of Division Street is eerily beautiful, and Rupture And Rapture contains one of the most striking lyrical moments i've ever heard as Rickley describes a beautiful bird in flight.... Just as it's smashed across a car's windshield.

But it all pales in comparison to what comes next. Track number four, Signals Over The Air, is a real contender for single of the year. The guitar harmonies on this song are just unbelievably, heart stoppingly beautiful, the drums deliver a potent backbeat, and the hardcore parts hit just the right note of intensity, making the softer parts seem better without overwhelming them. The lyrics, once again dealing with relationships, aren't any new ground for Thursday, but the chorus ranks as one of the band's best: "When you say my name/ I want to split it from your lips and hide/ like whispers in the rain!/ When you say my name/ I want to stop it in your lungs/ and collect all of your blood/ to put in the radio".

Marches And Manuvers deals directly with the everyday stuggles Thursday write about so often. However, this track takes a more hard-edged lyrical bent to the problem, with a screamed background vocal encouraging everyone "KEEP FIGHTING", presumably against the system. This is another sans-melody track, and shows once again that Thursday can definately do heavy when they want to.

Asleep At The Chapel is another brilliant track, and may be one of the most profound songs ever written about faith (or in this case, a lack of it). Rickely spends most of the track singing about the evil men do to each other and how many people's solution is simply to pray, but towards the end he begins to chant "Lord, oh Lord, can You save us?", and closes with a stunning cry of "HALLELUJAH!". It's a sterling vocal performance, definately one of the best of the year. It's also notable that between the muted, mandolin-sounding guitar chords and layered background vocals, the band sounds almost as beautiful as the choirs they think are unnecessary.

This Song Brought To You By A Falling Bomb is the disc's one minor mistake, a piano-led ballad just a little over two minutes long that feels much more like an interlude than an actual song. Steps Ascending is much better. For the first 3/4 or so, the song is another heavy masterpiece from the group, this time featuring lyrics about the apparent death of Rickely's girl, but for the last minute or so of the song, the band starts playing melodically and Rickley delivers one of the most impassioned vocals on a disc full of them. "As the ambulance turned on it's lights, you were turning into red roses" sings Rickley. It's a brilliantly poetic, dark image.

War All The Time is more or less the apex of the disc. Unlike the other songs, which favor tempo changes and the like, this one begins acoustically and gradually builds to a roaring climax. Rickley begins the track by narrarting the story of how a friend's brother died when he was a child, and from there seems to start adressing wars and 9-11 so that by the time the track ends, he's gone from talking about a single death to the genocide of millions. By the time he screams "We've grown up too fast/ now we're falling apart!" for the final time over a bed of guitars as thick as a kevlar vest, it sounds like he wants to break down and start bawling. The acapella children's choir on this one was a nice touch as well.

The disc closes with two more standard Thursday rockers, M. Shepard and Tomorrow I'll Be You. M. Shepard purports to be about the murder of Matthew Shepard by two strongly anti-gay men, but the lyrics seem to touch more on the destruction of things for no real reason except blind hatred.... "Tearing the wings from a butterfly" as Rickley puts it. I liked how, although the band makes no overt refernces to the murder in the song, they name-check picket fences and "people on the other side of the frame" periodically. Tomorrow I'll Be You is an odd but amusing collection of atmospheric lyrics. Both songs feature the traditional melodic-hardcore dynamic that Thursday has become known for.

CONCLUSION
Emotional Hardcore (or "Screamo", as some people insist on calling it) is poised to break out in the next year, between the hype for Finch's next release and the recent major label signing of A Static Lullaby. Usually, when an underground genre breaks into the mainstream, it becomes watered down and virtually unlistenable, but if the major label releases by these groups measure up to War All The Time, I say bring it on. This is definately more of what we could use in the mainstream. Cop this now.