First off, isn't that a great album cover? Kind of an archetypal punk rock cover, that one. The record itself isn't quite as good as its cover, but it comes close. So:
The Body, the Blood, the Machine is a punk rock concept album about living in the age of Bush. It's basically an indie version of Green Day's
American Idiot, with a very important difference being that it's not an overproduced piece of junk designed to appeal to theater majors and Johnny Depp fans (redundancy)? What the Thermals do very well here is to combine their punk and pop influences so that neither one cancels the other out. This is a hard thing to do, as evidenced by the followup
Now We Can See in which the band tilted a little too far toward the "pop" side and basically became Weezer with better lyrics. There are a couple of excellent tracks in the middle of this album that are almost ballads: "Returning to the Fold" and "Test Pattern" maintain their edge through the great production and excellent vocals. The problem is that the album is incredibly samey and that three or four songs near the end of the album are basically the same as those at the beginning, except weaker and a lot longer. So it's not all good. But about half of it is, and it's probably the best thing the Thermals, a profoundly middling band, will ever do, so cherish it, I guess.
MY RATING:
6.8
The Thermals - "Here's Your Future"
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