Customer Reviews

Body the Blood the Machine

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I expect little from most pop/punk/indie music except the usual: boo hoo I lost my girl friend or my friend takes drugs. The Thermals third album -- while almost as flaming as the other two -- adds layers and layers of symbolism and meaning.

You really have to buy the CD or find a source for the lyrics. You know something is up when you see a picture of Jesus on the cover with clouds, machine parts, and the earth in the background. The spirit of the album is essentially the search for meaning while in a mechanistic, military, and materialist culture.

Here is the song cycle:

1. here's your future -- Addresses the essential question of what is a just god and can we trust god to do more than make us fear.

2. I might need you to kill -- Addresses the same issues as The Clash's Clampdown -- the way institutional religion and economic structures dehumanize the individual and force us to lose our humane values.

3. An ear for baby -- Is the inner fear that we all will feel when we are dictated to or controlled -- very similar feel to the opening scene of Apple's original Super Bowl ad for the McIntosh -- but without the positive resolution.

4. a pillar of salt -- musically this is my favorite song. In the Bible Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt for her sins. Lyrically it an incredible assault on the idea of god as separate from the human realm and the nature of sin is caused simply by our being human. You can almost feel his baby slipping away and turning to salt.

5. returning to the fold -- Is about the fear of not being "saved" and the ambiguity we all feel about our inner being and its relationship to the senses. Reminds me a little bit of the Buddhist Heart Sutra -- no eyes, no ears, no tongue, no body, no mind...

6. test pattern -- Is about whether we have the ability to make the existentail choice to chose our own spiritual life or not.

7. st. rosa and the swallows -- Incredible. Holding St. Rosa (Portland's flower) is holding close to your true self, your love, your community of fellow beings.

8. Back to the sea -- Returning to the sea is the Jungian equivalent of returning to god. We crawl from the sea for our individuation and we crawl or fall back to the sea our primal self.

9. power doesn't run on nothing -- This is the heart of the machine that runs on blood and money -- the very reality that we fear the most -- dehumanized and far from the life of the spirit.

10. i hold the sound -- In many spiritual traditions -- the Word is God -- and the sound is the access point to the sprit even in death.

This is far beyond the usual pabulum passed off as pop music. The Thermals are worth studying as well as listening to the sound. I recommend reading The Rebel by Albert Camus to understand rebellion that runs this deep.

In a word...yes.

The Body, the Blood, the Machine is not an album that grabs you from the get go, but once it gets its hooks into you, you'll be coming back to it over and over.

It's true, the lyrics have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but then this music isn't meant to be subtle. It's a hard rockin', do-it-yourself indie masterpiece. Listeners of Rush Limbaugh stay away, the Thermals have just dropped an a-bomb of an album.

An outstanding album from the first elongated organ cord, held for a moment before the guitar starts; The guitar is given a moment by itself to breath before the drums tumble in with Hutch, as he yells `Here's your future!' Bedlam and bitter, bitter sarcasm well up together, and overflow at 1:43 with that guitar line that sounds so good it might be impossible not to pump your fist at least a few times.

And there are many other superlative tracks (really there isn't a weak song here) allowing one the freedom to choose the three of four tracks that speak most powerfully to them, out of the 7 or 8 excellent songs on the album. Power Doesn't Run on Nothing is the dark, caustic heart of the album. From when The Beat first rolls over one minute and half in, until Hutch tells us its not fair and we don't care a little over a minute later; that has to be the purest minute and a half of rock produced in a long time.

I still enjoy the first two Thermals albums, and might have enjoyed them more if there been a bigger gap before discovering this album. It feels structured, lyrically dense, and complete in a way the earlier albums can't touch. One can't help but feel that `Body, Blood and Machine' sounds exactly like the band wanted it to sound. As good a rock album as our new century has seen.

This album is f*ck*ng amazing. Listen to it while driving and you will get there faster. You will also be happier and cured of disease. Fun yet political and philosophical punk rock for the thinking man.

Fans of "F*ckin' A" will be thrown off at first listen because it isn't as immediate. The songs don't grab you by the throat and demand your attention, and the CD contains actual song breaks. The band is maturing, and while I love the earlier stuff to death, this is a major step forward. I'd compare it to when Sleater-Kinney released "The Hot Rock," after "Call the Doctor" and "Dig Me Out" - a more subtle, nuanced album, but an outstanding one all the same.

This is an ALBUM. The Thermals have not just put together random songs connected by nothing without any meaning. A breath of fresh air, this album is a perfect example of a lost art where the sum of the parts is not greater than the whole. Sarcastic, biting and revealing, The Body, the Blood, the Machine is a commentary on the relationship of our society and religion. The Thermals pull this off without being too irreverent and with just enough smarts combined with a more palatable sound than their previous albums. Every song on this album is lyrically and musically superb. I recommend listening to this album from first to last track, completely. This is an ALBUM.

Isn't there something great about bands that play guitars?

Sometimes I think not. Sometimes I just listen to hip-hop. And I embrace technology in all of its futuristic glory. But then sometimes I just want some goddamn guitars. And Led Zeppelin is great, and I always go back to them, but sometimes I need something more white. Something more suburban? Something more immediate? Something without layers of sound, just three or four musicians in a room. Listen to The Thermals' album The Body, The Blood, The Machine. Or Green Day Dookie. There is energy and urgency and immediacy. Punk rock may be a commodity, but that was only inevitable. The attitude is still real. Understanding the world around you, but instead of ignoring it or letting it get you down, you confront it and sneer at it as if you couldn't care less.

(Seriously, though, check out The Thermals and then recommend a better punk rock band. I don't know if you could...)

The Body, The Blood, The Machine is an energetic and entertaining rock record with punk attitude and lyrics about God, The Bible, and existentialism and war and it's good.

I stopped listening to Punk Rock years ago. I still like it, but as you can imagine I've fallen behind when it comes to what the new great punk bands are. The Thermals though aren't just a great punk band, they are a great band that grow beyond their genre. This album is brilliant on so many different levels. It's loud and agressive, but catchy and smart. I'm not just saying that this album is one of the best of the decade because it's one of the best that I've heard, but it made the "Best Of The Decade" lists on tons of different music magazines and websites.

There are many reviews posted already that describe why this is such a great record...so I won't go into too much detail. Yes, the lyrics are a little heavy-handed, but the band manages to touch on a lot of weighty issues in a pretty small space. The music builds a sense of tension which, with the lyrical content, produces a feeling of barely controlled fury.

The only warning I would have is that some might be turned off by the tone of the singers voice. I think it's perfect for the record however. He has a vocal delivery and tone that sounds both snotty and wise...and how often do you get to use those two words together to describe something?

A stunning album and a real surprise. The first two Thermals albums - especially "More Parts Per Million" - were both great, but the maturity of the songwriting on this album goes way beyond anything they had done before. These are still intense, driving rock songs, but the lyrics are much sharper and the playing tighter and more diverse than it was on their other records. This really shows the Thermals to be one of the best rock bands out there right now in any genre.