Thursday Send Critics Racing For The Lyric Sheets

noah | February 17, 2009 10:00 am

Our look at the closing lines of the week’s biggest new-music reviews continues with a look at reactions to Common Existence, the Dave Fridmann-produced album from New Jersey post-hardcore outfit Thursday:

• “But ‘Friends in the Armed Forces’ is one of the most direct, and poignant, treatments of the country’s current wars that any rock band has yet attempted. Here, Mr. Rickly has finally looked beyond himself and has found a cause worthy of his anguish. ‘Another folding flag to a mourning mother/He was an Army of one but they’ll find another,’ he sings.” [Jon Caramanica, NYT]

• “On ‘Resuscitation of a Dead Man,’ Rickly sings, ‘Can you feel a pulse?/It’s been stopped for so long./Let’s restart it!’ I couldn’t sum up the album and its impact any better. [Drew Beringer, AbsolutePunk]

• “Common Existence is long on complicated instrumental textures and twisty-turny song structures yet woefully short on the fist-pumping melodies that keep this kind of stuff from sounding like musical math. As a result, tracks such as ‘Last Call’ and ‘Subway Funeral’ are easier to admire than to enjoy.” [Mikael Wood, EW]

• “The band wants to play art-rock, experimental hardcore, stormy pop, and some other beautiful and brutal stuff for which we don’t yet have labels, but they want to play it all at once, and so far they haven’t developed the musical competence to streamline their sonic pluralism into something fit for consumption.” [Matthew Cole, Slant]