Wandering into North Carolina venue the Cat's Cradle circa 2000, I was pleasantly surprised by a mob of shaggy-haired Californians, the ringleader dressed as a 1980s aerobics instructor and dancing like a rubber marionette, banging crash cymbals and chanting something like, "Can you feel it? Jackson 5! Soul clap, Jackson 5!" It turned out to be !!! and Nic Offer, who helped light the fuse of the millennial dance-punk craze and have managed to stick around long after it burned out. Many of their peers favored a more cramped and anxious sound, but !!! stood out as freewheeling party monsters that radiated sunny vibes. Thirteen years and five LPs later, the mostly well-turned but low-impact Thr!!!er has all the hallmarks of !!!, minus a crucial one: abandon.
At first, the band suggested that their name could be pronounced as any number of percussive onomatopoeias, but the marketplace quickly settled on "Chk Chk Chk," a fair approximation of the scratchy funk guitars that are their lifeblood. From their self-titled 2001 debut to 2004's Louden Up Now, !!! stretched their wooly punk-funk into sleeker realms of disco both leftfield and pop, blending the influences of Arthur Russell and the Bee Gees with Talking Heads and Liquid Liquid-inspired rave-ups. The band's stylistic expansion peaked in the influential indie-house single "Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)" before they pivoted away from exfoliating odysseys on 2007's Myth Takes, where meaty rock and soulful deep house tropes came to the forefront of radio-formatted songs with thunderous live drums.
2010's Strange Weather, Isn't It? was a back-to-basics album that kept the shorter track lengths of Myth Takes but inserted icy grooves where most of the sticky hooks and cathartic dynamics had been. A palate-cleansing minimal dance album was a timely idea, but at four or five minutes apiece, the songs just didn't have time to simmer like the epic "Giuliani", often petering out before they could boil over. The same proportional issues cap off the impact of Thr!!!er, with one lean, mannered workout after another fading to silence just when it really starts cooking. "Even When the Water’s Cold" is a lively example of the general problem: It has a funk part, a wah-wah part, a dubby interlude, a mild coda. But the dynamic line running through them is flat and unsurprising, never exploding us through the top or plunging us through the bottom of the song.
Though Thr!!!er continues in the same vein as Strange Weather, it's differentiated by a warmer sound palette. !!! melt the ice crystals that rimed their last record with mystic vocal harmonies on "Fine Fine Fine", reverbed flute loops on the percolating "Careful", and an overall tilting of emphasis from electronic tootles toward tidy, curlicued funk musicianship. The record is taut with the usual wiry, kinked guitars, ropy bass lines, popping handclaps, chanting choruses, and falsetto outbursts, all working efficiently for dancers but evading big moments for listeners. This thinness at the level of content is glaring only on "Get That Rhythm Right", where unflattering vocal processing fails to conceal a nebulous vocal melody while flotsam of dubious taste-- goofy sound effects, fleeting filters, a timorous smooth sax interlude-- spins aimlessly on a whirlpool of bass and drums.
As retro-house vamping goes, the svelte and slippery "Slyd" fares much better, especially mixed with vocals cuts from Molly Schnick of !!!'s now-dead but arguably superior sister band, Out Hud. "Californiyeah" and "One Girl/One Boy" have some of the cracking pop panache that elevated Myth Takes, but the tracks that aim for transcendence through recombinative repetition are just too brief and buttoned-down to get there. For all of Thr!!!er’s reliable pleasures, the requisite cover-image riff on the triple-bang logo is the boldest idea here, which makes for an awfully modest record to hold up against the pop-canon cornerstone for which it was named.
