With an economical use of language, a keen sense of the rhythms of repetition, and a sly, unobtrusive way with the reoccurring images that interest him (the sea, eyes/vision, the earth), the Thermals' Hutch Harris has always been able to ponder life's big questions without being ponderous. It helps that his words are always set against such sublimely sloppy pop riffs. But on Now We Can See, his band's fourth full-length, he takes advantage of a newfound musical maturity, buffing his fuzzy riffs into polished power-pop, which finally casts a much-deserved spotlight on his lyrics.
When last we head from the Portland trio, they were down a member-- newbie drummer Westin Glass has since stepped behind the kit, though it is not his time-keeping that you hear on Now We Can See-- and hot off the acclaim of The Body, The Blood, The Machine, their scathing indictment of life in Christian theocracy, one of the more time capsule-worthy records of the Bush administration. So how does a poppy punk band follow up such a feat in the cautiously optimistic early days of the Obama administration? After proving they could take on "topics that matter" while maintaining their thrilling musical simplicity, it would have been a disappointment to see them revert to the gleefully grimy garage-punk of their early albums, on which Harris simply used his lyrical prowess to breathlessly catalog sexual power struggles. But not only does our new president mean that we have (hopefully) outgrown the need for an album like TBTBTM, but the band is also too joyously silly and powerfully spazzy to get stuck solely in the often dowdy realm of "important" political songwriting. The compromise, then, is Now We Can See, a concept album of sorts from the perspective of the dead that acts as a denouement to the last Thermals' record. It's an album that looks at life not as something to urgently struggle through, but as something that has already passed, something that our narrator finally has some perspective on.
And this is why Harris is such an admirable songwriting talent: He writes about universal subjects with a sharply specific eye, and he has the imagination to transcend his own point of view to write from a character's perspective that there's no way he could share. Cramming in as many syllables as his thrifty, tightly coiled melodies will allow, Harris announces the collection's themes and tone with album opener "When I Died", singing, "Busted and wrecked/ Justly infected/ My body beyond repair/ Had no objection, sir/ My only questions were/ 'Where do I go and will I know when I'm there?'/ But I really couldn't say that I cared."
Now We Can See is full of the regret you would expect from the recently deceased, but it's also rife with acceptance and relief. For every track like "We Were Sick", the incendiary, three-chord rant against the selfishness of the living and our indifference and contribution to the ecological crisis, there's a track like "I Let It Go", which is practically giddy in its liberation, celebrating the release of death. Now We Can See is bursting with clear-headed explorations of the ways that fear and neuroses hold us back from truly living (as on "When I Was Afraid"), winkingly clinical examinations of the rote machinations that consume our lives (like "Liquid In, Liquid Out"), and tales of the savagery at the basis of modern existence (like the title track or "When We Were Alive"). Maybe these are pretty heady topics after all.
