Thank You - Terrible Two (Thrill Jockey)
4/5
By: Eduardo Curi
Whenever a new band shows up playing music that has absolutely no pattern, rhythmic, melodic or harmonic structure, there are always people willing to assert that they play the music of the future. This might be true for Thank You and their Terrible Two album, but as with all things temporal, only time will tell whether they are correct.
If in a few years people will be looping samples extracted from this record to great, pioneering effect, then we will be able to look back and say "yeah, the label was kinda right when they said these guys were cool", but if you go to a rave, club or whatever and never listen to a single note from any of these five (count 'em!) tracks again, you might think Thank You were just some bunch of twats trying to sell noise to the public as a joke.
The facts, if there are any at all, are that Thank You take it from where Mogwai left it, and bring up instrumental pop music to a new level. I've heard of people using non harmonic sounds to write commercial pop songs. But here, for the first time, I've heard people using harmonic instruments to write determinedly non-harmonic music.
But you cannot look at this piece of music only on face value if you are to get something out of it - there is a concept behind it, and the fun is deciding what that is. Respect to these Thank You guys and their edgy experimentation. Not everyone has the guts to get out there with a band and start banging their kits like they do. And respect to Thrill Jockey too, for allowing them to do it. Thanks to people like them bands like Thank You can exist and, maybe, find out new ways of making music - music that just might be, then, the music of the future.
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment