The Thermals - "Personal Life"
Personal Life is a return to form for The Thermals, a welcome return although I am hearing in many quarters complaints that The Thermals are like The Ramones only without the fun.
Yes, I do note a certain resemblance. Yes, it is true that every Thermals record sounds alike just like The Ramones, whose every studio album – all 14 of them (actually I thought there were more) – sounded alike. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have merit. It’s always been my point of view that you needed one Ramones studio recording in your collection, one live recording - I recommend It’s Alive - and one greatest hits package. The same is true of The Thermals. You need one studio record of theirs in your collection (probably the first one you hear, which is also true of The Ramones), one of their two live albums, and hopefully they’re around long enough to put out a greatest hits package and with an album as strong as Personal Life, they will be.
What changes for Thermals albums is the target. Thermals albums thematically reflect the recent concerns of Hutch Harris, the lyricist/vocalist/guitarist in the band. The Body, The Blood, The Machine was an investigation into the abuse of religion by a conservative government. Now We Can See was named in celebration of Barack Obama’s election and the hope that after eight years of conservative tyranny the nation was beginning to see light at the end of a tunnel, but the album itself was plagued by thoughts of death and drenched in water imagery. The best thing it had going for it was the collage on the cover.
As I said previously, Personal Life - for me - is a return to form, which belies the notion that all Thermals albums are created equal. Personal Life is about love gone bad so we can tell Hutch is crawling out of the wreckage of relationship and since we’ve all gone through that at some point, the album’s universal.
Personal Life opens with ‘I’m Gonna Change Your Life’ - a medium rocker - and then – with a WHOOSH! - we get the single ‘I Don’t Believe You’. Foster’s background “oh-ohs” this makes the standout track that will one day be on The Thermals greatest hits package. Still, for me, it’s the third track ‘Never Listen To Me’ that is Personal Life’s killer, addictive track. To me, it is what LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Drunk Girls’ was supposed to be: the song of the summer of 2010. It opens with a drumbeat as old as The Stooges, has a guitar line worthy of The Cure, and every time I hear it – every time! – I find myself air drumming to it. It’s the longest song on the album at 4:30 and still I wish it was longer.
Carried along by Kathy Foster’s melodic, punky basslines and shoved by Westin Glass’ snare shots, Hutch Harris and his bandmates have delivered an infectious album that is uplifting in spite of the heartbreak.
