“Eat This City”
from the album Justamustache
2005
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Thunderbirds are Now! used to come off cocky. Or they used to try really, really hard to come off cocky, hoping that no one would notice it was a sham.
“The whole cocky attitude was sort of a mask,” said Ryan Allen, the (suburban) Detroit band’s singer and guitarist.
“We kind of knew at the bottom of it that we still had a long way to go. Our attitude was, if we become larger than life where our attitude is concerned, maybe people will ignore the fact that we’re kind of sloppy and our songs are kind of underdeveloped.”
It’s not like they were worrying themselves over nothing, either. Two or three years ago, Thunderbirds are Now! was still a band driven more by the frenetic energy of youth than by any exceptional sort of vision or skill.
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Thunderbirds Are Now! |
They could deliver danceable, synthed-up punk rock at an unrelenting pace. They were daring enough to experiment, unpretentious enough to be goofy. But they were also a little sloppy.
They aren’t so sloppy any more. Their latest album, Justamustache, is a sharply executed, musically subtle, almost shockingly melodic effort (considering the band was once known for throwing kitchen implements into the musical mix).
Which is to say that it’s different in style and quality both. Thunderbirds are Now! have dressed up their freakouts in New Wave clothing. They’ve got the guitar-synth double-pronged attack. They’ve got the Casio-style beats. And they’ve got a sugary, infectious vibe that’s reminiscent of bands like Blondie or the Cars, if still a bit harder.
Allen said the shift started some time ago. Their old sound had started to bore them (or him, as the guy who does the lion’s share of the songwriting). They didn’t want to become one trick ponies. They started mixing things, going for something both “mainstream and still totally fucked up.”
Some bands — and Allen used the pop-punk group My Chemical Romance as a case in point — are too easy to understand, he said.
“It’s like, ‘This is catchy. This has a good chorus,’ and I’m done. I don’t need to delve deeper. All I want to know is they have nice hair and their songs are catchy. You can make catchy music, but keep it weird at the same time.”
He also believes you can make catchy music without having nice hair. Though sometimes he worries about his hair. Part of dropping that old cocky pose is apparently a newfound willingness to talk about personal insecurities.
“I think more bands should be honest and say, ‘Sometimes I wake up and I’m like, God, I feel fat today,’ ” he said.
Call it the band’s new earnestness. Allen said they’ve even dropped some of their old goofiness, the same goofiness that led them to create songs with titles like “Not Witherspoon, but Silverstone” and “When It Comes to Elements, Hydrogen is Titz.”
“You can only be funny so long,” Allen said.
Being as they’re done with the goofy bit, done with the hyper-confident facade, what’s left? Inner confidence, Allen claims.
“We’re trying to get away from championing ourselves as this great thing,” he said. “We’re done trying to convince people verbally. We’re going to make the music speak for itself.” ~ Matthew Miller, Lansing Noise