Thank You - Golden Worry
- Written by Greg Salter
The press release for Thank You’s new album, Golden Worry, tries to root the band firmly in their current home city of Baltimore. If it is their equivalent of Joy Division’s Manchester – “playground, obstacle course, and muse” – then Thank You have pulled off a similar trick to Ian Curtis and his bandmates 30 years ago. Golden Worry transcends place, while still revealing little glimpses of where it sprung from – just as through the course of their career, Joy Division’s soundscapes and Curtis’ voice rose beyond Macclesfield, then Manchester, into the bleakest ambiguous soundscapes, so Thank You seem to be fashioning a musical landscape all of their own – one that could come from anywhere and nowhere at once.
They’re another band with a difficult-to-google name, so we’ll have to stick to basic facts – Thank You are a trio, made up of Jeffrey McGrath, Michael Bouyoucas, and Emmanuel Nicolaidis, who all play “everything” and are veterans of the Baltimore music scene. A basic drums-guitars-vocals set up is augmented with seemingly anything they can get their hands on – an organ, a moog, a sampler – so these six songs across 30 minutes balance simplistic punk/no-wave approach that lend them a certain amount of immediacy, intricate detail that gives them depth, and a well-honed compositional approach.
It does feel like the careful attention to composition and pacing really help make Golden Worry – songs ebb and flow through musical passages and into each other, with keyboard drones often forming the basis for songs. These drones also provide something for the three musicians to hold on to, as the music often erupts like a geyser with bursts guitar and drums, as on the Deerhoof-gone-tropical-punk of ‘Continental Divide’ or the dissonant ambient-thrash of ‘Strange All’, which becomes increasingly paranoid and inward-looking as it progresses, before collapsing in on itself and emerging on the other side as a slightly prettier beast than when it began.
Some may balk at the relatively short length of the album – it is only half an hour long, but it packs so much energy and so many ideas into its songs that it is its density rather than length that will keep you entertained. ‘1-2-3 Bad’ is all forward momentum, with its chants overlapping each other and bright guitar lines. Melody creeps in unexpectedly, as in the keyboards on ‘Birth Reunion’, and often remains, just visible under the pummelling drums – despite the volume, one does not overwhelm the other.
Such a dedication to the complexities of noise and rhythm does suggest parallels with no-wave, particularly Liquid Liquid and early Sonic Youth. It makes me want to draw a superficial comparison between the Baltimore scene from which Thank You emerged and New York in the late ‘70s – however, while those bands sounded drained of colour, Thank You’s music seems to shimmer, and positively gleam in certain places, with different hues. It’s difficult to think of a band in recent memory who have employed these noisy, post-punk influences and sounds to such a focused, varied degree.