Thank You
Terrible Two

The Thank You emerged from Baltimore less than a year ago with their debut album World City and navigate between Battles, A Minor Forest, OOIOO, Hella and Tortoise. Now they're back with their second full-length, Terrible Two, and they are increasingly skillful and original.

But no one pays attention to them.

NME doesn't care.

Neither does Rumore.

In Italy, it's not even known if they exist.

I think it will be very unlikely to spot Terrible Two in the best records charts of music magazines at the end of the year. And certainly not due to the poor skills of the band in question! But who cares in the end? The critics worship them. And rightly so.

The aforementioned CD includes 5 tracks for 35 minutes of hallucinated Post-Rock and frenetic Avant-Punk (okay, okay, it's true, there are already enough dumb labels, but this one gives a good idea and anyway I didn't invent it =]).

It's not easy to describe the music of Thank You...Let's see...Think of a seismograph...

Their pieces are a continuous up and down. Pauses, unexpected mood swings, syncopated rhythms, sudden accelerations, and percussion always in the foreground, pounding, super-fast, devastating, hypnotic.

Take Empty Legs, for instance, the opening track, which perfectly sums up in 6 and a half minutes the sound of Jeffrey McGrath, Elke Wardlaw, and Michael Bouyoucas. It starts with a whistle and super-fast percussion to which, after a few seconds, plaintive voices, samples, and piercing guitars are added. 2 Minutes and 10: a one-second pause and the percussion rolls more than before. Given the continuous crescendo, a final climax would seem inevitable, but the climax doesn't come. It's too predictable and not for Thank You, who after 5 minutes calm down, a few more rounds of drums, a few sporadic guitars here and there, and we come to the end of the first, psychotic Neo-Prog sketch.

 If the pseudo-organ of Self With Yourself creates a very Psych atmosphere, a completely different style comes with Pregnant Friends, where Jeffrey and company chant something vaguely resembling Gregorian chants accompanied by primitive percussion. The unusual impromptu mass lasts only just over 3 minutes because after a slow, long pause, the guitars go crazy in a frenzied Noise Rock homage à la Melt Banana which grows until it implodes in a surreal lullaby very Fuck Buttons (the title track).

The calm after the storm.

Not trivial nor immediate. Among whirls of screeching and visionary guitars, obsessive organ, disturbing choruses, Math influences, and tribal percussion, you come out of this record pleasantly dazed, like after a trip.

The Thank You are the more cultured and less raucous Lightning Bolt.

Unpredictable.

P.S. Read Blow Up, it's good for you.