Brass tacks and other serious metaphors

Last night I used the word exacerbate in casual dialogue.

I felt like a golden god.

My mom dropped by the university yesterday, it reminded me keenly of what an alien landscape this place can be. Family living is unbelievably different from school-livin', innit? I miss my momma.

Words cannot express my glee over the early birthday present I received today from my most excellent fish, Krista. Marylin Manson covered This Is Halloween. I'm not overly enamoured of
Mister Manson, but hearing a metal cover of that song was an actual, written down goal of mine. Something to do by the age of thirty, you see. The thrill I felt upon listening was
religious, and honestly? I cried a little.

Okay. I'm having trouble writing about the hip bands that a hip boy like myself actually listens to on a regular basis, and seem to keep coming back to my unusual mainstream fixations. I'll try to fix that, but I simply can't shut up about Thrice's Vheissu. Jams hasn't heard the end of it, and I don't intend to stop until I've convinced at least one freaking member of the indie community that this album is worth a damn.

It's easy to see the problem with the album. No one could be expected to listen to it, and in the liner notes the band reports that they couldn't even find a producer willing to touch their new direction. Screamo was waning rapidly, and their seminal The Artist In The Ambulance had unjustly been touted as one of the premiere results of that movement. Very few had paid attention to the bands insistence that they didn't care for the screamo fad one bit, and strove to be more of an Isis or Pelican than a My Chemical Romance. With a long break between albums, apparently full of reflection and musical experimentation, the band tried to convince the musical community of their larger-than-genre ambitions and hard-earned maturity, but who was going to listen?

Anyone willing to listen to the refinement and grandiosity of Vheissu has to overcome the appallingly negative emo-stigma that's so unpopular nowadays (some would say finally). Likewise, such a huge component of the band's fanbase was composed of skinny, fad-beholden emo kids now either moving on to "better bands like teh awesome Panic! at the Disco!" or hitting puberty and diving headlong into faux-esoteric college rock standards like Sufjan or the Decemberists (Which no one knows about and you wouldn't understand because they are sooo way artistic you pleibs), that these poor men couldn't hope not to make martyrs of themselves.

Vheissu is smart, literate, brilliantly aggressive, and beautiful. It reminds me intensely of the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan in execution. Both outfits released a blistering, album-opening single too reminiscient of their established style, then proceeded to craft albums unlike anything they'd ever produced.

Every man in Thrice's solid quartet is a master of their respective instrument. Riley Breckenridge is one of punk's best drummers, and his work on Vheissu far outshines my standard favourite's (Mark Gajadhar of the Blood Brothers) latest work. Listen to any track Vheissu has to offer and tell me you aren't impressed, from his subdued electronica-inspired beats on Atlantic - an unbelievably fine accent to a chillingly perfect ballad - to his fiercly technical runaway train assaults on the album's heavier tracks, like Image of the Invisible and Hold Fast Hope. There's something unidentifiable about this drummer. Every track he lays down seems heart-wrenchingly weightless.

Teppei Teranishi is an absolutely outstanding guitar prodigy, a brilliant, consistently creative guitarist not receivingn half the praise he deserves. His reverb-drenched solo on Of Dust And Nations serves as my computer's bootup sound, and will for a long time to come. This man is unwilling to allow a single basic chord dirty his instrument, content instead to send astonishing firework melodies and gleaming siren leads skipping across frontman Dustin Kensrue's denser noise.

I feel woefully inadequate in describing the performance of any guitarist, any where, and Teppei defies my abilities to the extreme.

I don't have time to discuss the bassist.  He's atmospheric and dreamy.

I've long thought that the band's output was somewhat less than the sum of its parts, but Vheissu is a beautifully coherent effort not tied down by its base components. The album enchants me. Its equisitely elaborated theme and imagery is that of a near-future, 1984-copping political apocalypse. Some critics have tried to reduce the band's message to a reaction against the emo scene they've tried to escape - they're mistaken. Herein is a celebration of human value, an everyman's revolt against assimilation, an endlessly poignant lament and plot against the machinations of military and politician and corporation. It is the music of refugees, prisoners, wounded, and slaves, and of their unity, and their rising up.

It evokes the frustration of down-trodden youth, the manipulation of intellect and emotion, the beauty of immaterial belief, the lost-meaning of freedom and safety, the obscured value of a human life.  

Vheissu is an incredibly articulate voicing of our generation's fear and oppression under the ever-swelling poltical malfeasance and corporate cheapness that envelops us.  This record is vital to me for this reason - I know of no one untouched by such feelings, but few can give release to them in the way Thrice does.  

And people would acknowledge this if they, you know, listened to the damn thing.

Tickets to call my last few paragraphs stupidly romantic and overly gushy must be bought through listening to Vheissu all the way through, jerks.

I think it sounds better when there's snow falling.