Thermals slow down on latest
The Thermals have been performing and touring since the early 2000s, but the band played for perhaps its largest crowd just last month. During a rally for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the band’s hometown of Portland (the same rally where a bird famously landed on Sanders’ podium), the indie rock trio took the stage with an acoustic version of their 2009 song “Now We Can See” for a crowd of nearly 12,000 people.
“People from the campaign called us a couple days before,” said Hutch Harris, the band’s primary songwriter and frontman. “At first they wanted us to do the whole band, then they said the Secret Service couldn’t approve all the instruments, so just do an acoustic thing. It kept changing, even the morning we were there. … Fifteen minutes before we went on stage, we were like, ‘Uh, what songs are we gonna do?’
“But it was really cool to get asked to do that. We’ve been in Portland almost 20 years, and it’s nice to be able to represent Portland.”
The Thermals return to Spokane to play the Bartlett this weekend. They last performed there in early 2014, just a few months after the venue opened.
“We’ve been playing Spokane since our very first tour,” Harris said. “Every time we’ve been to Spokane it’s been great. … We played the Bartlett two years ago, and that was a great show. We really love that venue.”
Harris writes deceptively catchy tunes about weighty subjects – mortality, spirituality, violence, politics, biblical plagues, the apocalypse – and the Thermals’ records tend to follow loose narratives: The most obvious example is the band’s breakout 2006 LP “The Body, the Blood and the Machine,” which tells the story of a couple’s attempts to escape a fascist religious cult.
“Sequencing is very important to me,” Harris said. “We’re still making records that are meant to be listened to from start to finish. … I want the record to make sense as a whole and I want it to tell a story. I want the songs to fit together like a puzzle.”
The Thermals’ latest album, titled “We Disappear,” isn’t rigorously conceptual, but it does document the dissolution of a relationship in 10 punchy tracks. Songs like “My Heart Went Cold” and “Thinking of You” are most emblematic of the Thermals formula – remorseful, borderline bitter lyrics hiding beneath fuzzy pop melodies, complete with earworm-y “whoa-oh-oh” choruses.
Produced by former Death Cab for Cutie member Chris Walla, who worked on three previous Thermals releases, “We Disappear” represents Harris’ desire to write a more hopeful breakup record than the band’s 2009 album “Personal Life.”
“That was such a cold and cynical view of relationships,” Harris said. “Not that the new one is cheery or anything, but I wanted to write about relationships in a way that was more realistic to me and less cynical about love in general.”
But what really differentiates “We Disappear” from any other Thermals record is its back half, which consists mostly of ballads.
“The songs that we’re most proud of on this record are the ballads, just because that’s really new and fresh to us,” Harris said. “It was like a challenge. It’s hard for us to play slow. There have been a lot of songs on previous records that were supposed to be ballads originally but just kept getting faster and faster.
“I just wanted some slower, heavier songs on this record, just to break it up and change the mood. We’re always trying to hang on to our original sound and do what we’re known for but still branch out at the same time.”