Talk to anyone who’s seen an indie rock show in Michigan during the 21st century and you’ll probably get a Fred Thomas story within the first thirty minutes or so. Maybe it was the time their band played with one of Thomas' 156 (give or take) musical projects at a warehouse in Ypsilanti. Or maybe they crossed paths at a demonstration in Detroit. To quote a colleague, "Fred Thomas is always standing right behind you at a basement show in Ann Arbor." Which is to say that Thomas is a "lifer", that mainstay of the local scene usually viewed with some combination of admiration and concern. Their commitment is cool even if they’re pushing 40 and clearly not in it for the money, but what are their alternatives? Do they have any marketable job skills?
Thomas' most well-known project, the lo-fi throwback pop troupe Saturday Looks Good to Me, developed a cult following, but was always on the verge of a mainstream-indie breakthrough that never happened. He's also released eight albums under his own name, but All Are Saved is the first to see widespread release. From the sound of things, Fred Thomas would be at peace if it was his last. It's in the tradition of a very specific kind of record, including Father John Misty’s Fear Fun, Sun Kil Moon’s Among the Leaves and the Wrens’ The Meadowlands—artists reinventing themselves as their actual self, lifers tired of watching their life pass by, tired of public indifference. With nothing to lose, Thomas ditches any pretense of metaphor to speak on every embarrassment and sleep-depriving doubt. And the results are devastating and funny in ways that previous releases barely even considered, a biographical work of art capable of leveling people who have never heard of Fred Thomas until the previous paragraph.
This is a record of epiphany, but there are no easy resolutions and false triumph. Despite its title, All Are Saved does not wrestle with mortality and arise with The Truth About What it All Means. It does not glorify the preciousness of our short existence. Most of it is derived from the realization that life, as it’s keenly described on "Cops Don’t Care Pt. II", "is so incredibly long/ Like a kiss on a bridge between two nervous ass kids/ Terrified of doing everything wrong." The image of teenage lip-locking pops up on two different songs: on "When They Built the Schools", Thomas recognizes the "jelly legs and awkward elbows" of first-timers who have no time for the "burden of nostalgia" that clings to him like a wetsuit and essentially translates to "regret".
Most of the memories Thomas processes on All Are Saved aren’t even good ones, and yet they’re revived with piercing clarity—drunkenly smashing his flip phone in a Baltimore basement in 2003; watching a girl get embarrassed by her dad’s use of slang on an airplane; the role reversal of going to a free dental clinic and having his dentist turn out to be a drummer he produced eight years ago. These are the types of situations that fill up an impossibly long life, so when Thomas opens the album asking his dog in its dying days whether trading 13 years of "walking in a clear straight line" for a human’s eight potential decades of fumbling is a "shitty deal", well... the answer is obvious, right?
The album at least sounds uplifting, adding layer after layer while Thomas spins desperately in place. The aesthetic reflects the two cities in which this album was created, honoring Athens' indie rock lineage by its Elephant 6-style thrift shop orchestration. If you’ve followed Thomas over the past two decades, this is a culminating work: the contrast of peppy horn blasts and foul-mouthed misanthropy on "Expo '87" recall Saturday Looks Good to Me; the spindly arpeggios of "When They Built the Schools" nod towards his emo-ish offshoot Lovesick; and the aquatic gurgling and electronic interludes make a case for reappreciation of his Type Records outlier City Center (namechecked in "Unfading Flower").
But otherwise, this is an idiosyncratic "singer-songwriter" record, filled with surprises and unorthodox percussion choices—a soupy tabla sample on "Unfading Flower", an erratic pound of a floor tom guiding the drunken amble of "When They Built the Schools". Vocally, Thomas largely abandons conventional song structure and melodies, taking on a quasi spoken-word approach that allows him the maximum word count and lends a sarcastic edge to his sly note on"Bedbugs": "If I seem too entertaining, I’m not singing, I’m just talking to you."
The most entertaining songs on All Are Saved are generally the cruelest: Both "Bedbugs" and "Bad Blood" speak in a language simultaneously more truthful and cutting than most of us allow ourselves. These rambling, bilious one-sided conversations might be mislabeled as "rants"; more accurately, they’re the kind of righteously angry emails you spend all night honing to a fine point, and then sleep on, waking up relieved you never hit "Send." Thomas provides us vicarious catharsis, but during the toxic airing of grievances of "Bedbugs", he makes the risks of such an approach perfectly clear—"You can’t tell everybody to fuck off forever.../ And be mortified when they finally do."
Thomas trudges through difficult relationships like most of us, being "so stilted and silent, not awkward, just angry." That’s how he describes his presumable run-in with a more successful artist on "Bad Blood", whose music he likens to "a pile of brown sweaters." All at once, he wishes he could go beyond their brief exchange and express his envy and resentments, that it could be Thomas on TV in 2015 had things worked out just a little bit differently for Saturday Looks Good to Me. Instead, he blasts through the fourth wall, summarizing the futility of his past decade with a gut punch—"This ‘first day of school’ shit just seems to keep happening...the smiles are so big and there’s no one at the gig." The most painful lines are Thomas quoting other people—"Hey I gotta go, but I’ll see you at the show!", "Man, it’s so cool, we’re glad you’re doing your own thing." It's the sound of Thomas realizing that most of his interactions are compromised by his own self-pity and dishonesty.
And yet, this realization is the strange source of hope in All Are Saved: Thomas seems inspired, even moved, by the possibility that the sharp, overwhelming and temporary pain of being forthright with someone can be a breakthrough after years and years of silence and half-truths. It ties back to that line about those kids on the bridge and how Thomas sets an example throughout *All Are Saved—*life is incredibly long when you’re terrified of doing anything wrong, and in the process of connecting with another person, it’s best to just go for it as directly as possible.
