MUSIC REVIEW: Thursday’s new album all about war
“War all the Time” is the scream-o band Thursday’s newest challenge for the music industry. Island Records released the anticipated album on Sept. 16 to hardcore, emo and punk fans.
This semi-progressive band of rockers is slowly bridging the gap from largely underground scream-o music into a more mainstream rock sound.
The four-year-old, New Jersey-based band was raised on basement punk shows and the bands’ members came together with a mutual love and respect for hardcore, dark pop and ’80s British new-wave bands. Thursday rocked out on bands such as The Smiths and The Cure.
The band chose the name Thursday because it has a certain level of anonymity to it. The band wanted people to buy their music because they liked it, not because someone was looking for a category. With a name like Thursday, you couldn’t really get any idea of what the music sounded like.
In past albums such as “Full Collapse,” Thursday really concentrated on their painful pasts and adolescence. The evolving band now seems to relay the message that everything a person does is a conflict, and life is a battle.
The album powerfully conveys the struggle that America’s youth has to live through in today’s world of constant confusing conflicts and choices.
According to the album’s jacket, the reason the band chose the name Thursday is because it is that it seems to be a transitional day of the week, and life is a series of transitions.
Transitions seemed to be something Thursday has immersed itself in changing. The instruments powerfully accentuate Geoff Rickly’s lyrical documentation of America’s youth. He cries, “In the shadow of the New York skyline we grew up too fast, falling apart like the ashes of American flags and we’re blowing in the wind. We don’t know where to learn … We’ve been falling for so long.”
The band has transitioned from singing about destruction and death of society into singing about a nation’s youth that has ineffably been torn and raped of their childhood by a war-happy country.
Rickly now seems to beg youth to stand their ground and not give up. In “M. Shepard” he says, “I’m on display, with the butterfly and the scarecrow, with smiles like picket fences, you tie us all up and leave us outside. That voice is silent now and the boat has sunk.” The entire band then screams, “We’re on our own but we’re not going to run.”
In “Marches and Maneuvers” the band paints a vivid scene of what greets America’s youth if the cycle of war and destruction continues.
“This is a war we live and the sides are drawn. We’re all wrapped up in fatigues and they wear us out … If we fly a white flag, under a black and blue sky, will the red sun rise? … The glare from your enemy sights make me go blind … blinds divide the sunlight into thin strips, the size of a blade, in this trench we dig for ourselves. Fourscore and fade … There’s no retreat. This is a war we live in.”
Perhaps Thursday is sending an anti-war message, but perhaps the band is bringing attention to the older generation – telling them that feeding their children with war-worn spoons and reading them tactical dreams of long ago is not how to raise a nation of strong youth.
Maybe we need to listen to the message today’s artists are bringing to the table. If you listened a little closer you would hear what they have to say. That their world is “one part loss, one part no sleep, one part the gun shot we heard, one part the screams mistaken for laughter, one part everything after, one part love, one part stepping out of the driving rain, one part parting ways, in the cold apartment. Don’t look back, just keep running down the stairs.”
They say, after time, all this will heal. We will rebuild and these broken arms will mend themselves in our embrace.
Kassie Robison is a sophomore majoring in print journalism. Comments can be sent to kassrobison@cc.usu.edu.