Thursday - 'War All The Time' (Mercury)
4/5
By: Toby L
Just when did emo get this hardcore...? Oh, but f**k the generalisations, ever-impending our musical youth to descend into a mess of singular classification that prevents them from adhering to anything other than one mere niche of musicality...
Though the point remains; with the likes of Glassjaw and - now - Thursday, seemingly, the rock-kids are veering from an unhealthy fascination with red-capped Britney-shaggers, and are instead finding themselves relating their angst to sets of far more accomplished and calculated rock-newbies. And with titles as gruellingly decided and overt as 'For The Workforce, Drowning' or 'This Song Brought To You By A Falling Bomb', then perhaps Thursday are also gonna give our global minors a history and political lesson in the same breath.
And it hits you just how effective the performers can prove in just the second track - 'Between Rupture And Rapture', where vocalist Geoff Rickly howls and bellows as restlessly as someone freshly buried alive, a wash of blanketing guitar-distortion and precision-orientated percussive-revolts creating an overall noise that seldom relents over its accompanying forty minutes.
'Division St' continues the manifesto, and you could fool yourself that the creeping pace of 'Signals Of The Air' would herald respite, time-out if you will, from the surging barrage of ear-battering racket that's rattling your speakers. Wrong. 'There's nowhere to hide/They stole the love from our lives to put sex on the radio', apparently.
So easy is it to mock extremism this volatile and incensed, but with the likes of fellow idealists Kinesis, maybe it's this severely angled, anguished slant that's needed to invoke an education too commonly overcast for fear of the masses revolting - and, blimey, isn't 'Marches and Maneuvers', the title-track and 'Tomorrow I'll Be You' enough of a hint of that: all dreary frustration and justified ferocity with instrumental-accompaniment as similarly commanding... The deafening, aggravated scream of the informed, uproarious youth.
Admirable and ardent, 'War All The Time' is up there with the unshakeable highlights of 2003's rock-calendar. Stomach, and swallow Thursday's truth whole - go on: we dare you.
Artists in this article: Thursday
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