Thursday - 2001 Full Collapse

Band : Thursday

Album : Full Collapse
Release Year : 2001
Genre : Post-Hardcore | Screamo

Tracklist : 

1. A0001
2. Understanding in a Car Crash
3. Concealer
4. Autobiography of a Nation
5. A Hole in the World
6. Cross Out the Eyes
7. Paris in Flames
8. I Am the Killer
9. Standing on the Edge of Summer
10. Wind-Up
11. How Long Is the Night?
12. I1100

Thursday are something special, something that is almost unique, and this album--of their five--does the best job of getting that across. The biggest draw musically of Full Collapse is that it is a work of stark contrasts. The aforementioned "Understanding in a Car Crash" demonstrates this beautifully, moving from the harsh and abrasive to the ambient and soothing in a matter of mere seconds. This is a trait that is found throughout the forty-two minutes of the album. Guitarist Tom Keeley is the star of the show here, twisting across frets to create beautiful melodies that transcend normal chord progressions; Steve Pedulla generally provides the garnish. The two always play off of each other very well, such as the in the pre-verse of "Understanding", or in the extended intro to "Autobiography of a Nation."

Rickly's vocal delivery is likewise a study in contrasts: he alternates between gut-wrenching screams and more tender murmurs, often juxtaposing the two beside each other, such as towards the end of "How Long Is the Night?" His lyrics focus on themes of loss, alienation, youth, despair, detachment, and modern society writ large. "Tuesday wakes up silent and there aren't enough pills / To sleep / Like a miswired short-wave radio...When you live in a nightmare / It's written all over your face," he sings at the end of "I Am the Killer." "We all dance to the same beat when we're marching / Yeah, the TV tells us what we need to know," Rickly sings in "Autobiography of a Nation." "The sides we take / Divide us from our faith / And the morning dove gets caught / In the telephone wire," he sings on "Cross Out the Eyes," the album's second single. This song also shows another side of Thursday, one that is further developed on later albums, the side that calls to mind dirty city skylines and the kids that live beneath them.

Full Collapse is generally pigeon-holed as a 'post-hardcore' album, and, while comparisons to bands such as Glassjaw and At the Drive-In might be appropriate, by and large this album is not post-hardcore in the way it is has generally been heard recently. Look for no filler breakdowns, wannabe deathcore stunts, over-sexed stage drama or eyeliner here. Thursday is the real deal. Thursday proved to the world once and for all that not all hardcore kids are idiots. You can play "screamy" music and still create intelligent, intelligible art. And Full Collapse deserves to be treated as such: a genuine work of art. And besides...anything that pisses Pitchfork off this much must have some potential, right?

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Thursday - 2011 Daytrotter Session

Band : Thursday

Album : Daytrotter Session
Release Year : 2011
Genre : Post-Hardcore | Screamo

Tracklist :

01-Welcome to Daytrotter
02-No Answers
03-Magnets Caught In A Metal Heart
04-Turnpike Divides

Some days we pretend like we're machines. We act as if we're just automobiles - counted on to start reliably every morning, in any condition. It could be bitterly cold. It could be unhealthily hot. There could be a deluge of rain, snow, hail, whatever could be falling from the sky at any given moment. We are relied on to react to the "key" being turned and he parts given their little doses of gasoline - getting that fuel into the lines. We haul the bones and themuscles, all the organs and our pleasantness wherever our day planner of Google calendar tells us to haul them. We act as if everyone else is an automobile, as well, doing similar hauling and being counted on to operate without paying much attention to what's really affecting it. New Jersey band Thursday, takes us into this world of clean math and messy summations, where there's a belief that things should work out, but the truth is typically nothing like that and these machines have a hard time dealing with these travesties, with being broken down on the side of the road, even if that was only a matter of time.

There's stock put into the metal hearts of these machines, these versions of machines. We trust that they'll stay in good shape, that they'll continue to receive whatever nourishment we send their ways, via the gullet, via the day or night. We trust that they'll behave themselves and that other metal hearts, in those other passing machines will do the same. It will all be mutually beneficial, but, wouldn't you know it, the short straw usually gets pulled. As machines go, there are a lot of lemons and they're always hard to tell until you begin to get dirty and start kicking their tires some, sleeping with them, finding yourself caring for them too much.

Thursday lead singer Geoff Rickly has made it a point to chronicle these abrasive tendencies in humans and the ways that they find of orbiting around each other, coming in contact with one another and spinning out, busting through the guard rails and plunging over the sides of mountains into heaps of mangled metal and surprise. He finds magic in the moments when people are falling apart, when they're breaking down and leaving wide swatches of their hide behind them, as if a trail, like the scattered pieces of semi tractor tires lying on the interstate to be dodged and avoided by everyone following. He finds magic in the ways that people act as if they're islands, or the unstoppable machines mentioned above, moving through their dawns and dusks as if they'll always be there and they can't be bested or dented, ruffled or rearranged. He brings this beautiful coldness, an arching kind of free-fall or flailing feeling into the words that he sings. He offers, "The more you take, the more you leave," here and there's an unbearable openness to the sentiment that still allows it all to be said. It's a slab of rubbery tread causing another swerving machine to react, hopefully well enough. -daytrotter

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Thursday - 2011 No Devolución

Band : Thursday

Album : No Devolución
Release Year : 2011
Genre : Post-Hardcore | Screamo

Tracklist : 

 01 – Fast To The End
02 – No Answers
03 – A Darkest Forest
04 – Sparks Against The Sun
05 – Open Quotes
06 – Past And Future Ruins
07 – Magnets Caught in a Metal Heart
08 – Empty Glass
09 – A Gun In THe First Act
10 – Millimeter
11 – Turnpike Divides
12 – Stay True

For someone who was just entering their teenage years around the same time that they released Full Collapse, there was no greater companion at the time than Geoff Rickly. His strained vocals, that in any other context would be looked down upon as something inferior, gave those of us that had stumbled upon the beginnings of the modern post-hardcore scene a sense of purpose, a sense of community in a post-9/11 landscape that was growing more and more distant and divided from everything that we wished it would be. This is why when earlier this year when Thursday announced that they would be playing their landmark 2001 release, a sea of early twenty-somethings leaped at the opportunity to relive those oh-so-fleeting moments of unity through the album that tied us all together.

It is through this lens, with Full Collapse so recently re-etched in our minds, to which Thursday are releasing their sixth album No Devolución . It is more than fitting. Besides Full Collapse, no other Thursday album shares that same feeling of perfect cohesion, where every song feels like its more than just instruments put to tape, like each track is a living and breathing entity of its own. That's not to knock the albums that they put out in between, because not only were they more than admirable inclusions that helped cement Thursday's status for years to come, they were also stepping stones, inching us ever closer to what they would create here on No Devolución, as the moods and themes visited across its twelve tracks all had their starts on previous albums. Take for example the album's emotional centerpiece “Empty Glass" which, besides the fact that it starts off in a manner that sounds exactly like Bright Eye's “Padraic My Prince”, blossoms into melancholy bloom of mournful synthesizers that feels like the big brother of A City By the Light Divided's closing call for reflection “Autumn Leaves Revisited”. Even the album's heavier tracks, like opener “Fast to the End” and “Open Quotes”, feel connected to this same emotional wellspring which when taken in as a whole makes No Devolución a complete work of post-hardcore beauty.

It's no surprise that even after fourteen years as a band Thursday could still pull off an album like No Devolución that re-envisions everything that they have accomplished in that time in a new light without sounding like a retread of old ideas. By combining these previously worked on sounds in new ways Thursday have created an album that is not only new and unique, but also unmistakably their own.

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Thursday - 2003 Live Acoustic From the Apple Store

Band : Thursday

Album : Live Acoustic From the Apple Store
Release Year : 2003
Genre : Post-Hardcore / Screamo

Tracklist :

01.Division St. (Live)

02.Signals Over the Air (Live)

03.War All the Time (Live)

04.This Side of Brightness (Live)

05.this song brought to you by a falling bomb (live)

Thursday performing acoustic live at the apple store santa monica CA on october 15th 2003. Enjoy it, it's really good acoustic live album.

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