The bass was violent and angry but never bleak, the delivery of the inaudible lyrics, lost in the noisy sound, was ferocious and on the aggressive side but the whole thing sounded upbeat and joyous like an exuberant chaotic party.
The punk rock band from Portland, The Thermals, was playing at the El Rey theater on Tuesday night after two opening bands that I missed, although I caught the last songs of the second act, White Fang, a quartet also coming from Portland, which was all legs in the air, back rolling on stage, with short angry and not-to-be-taken-seriously songs, about how Portland sucks, or how they want to get high or drunk, or both… kids!
It’s too bad I could not make sense at all of the Thermals lyrics from where I was, the bass played by the energetic Kathy Foster covering Hutch Harris’ voice, because I got the impression they were really powerful seeing how the fans knew all the lines and were singing them fists in the air. But I thought their songs were all about her bass sounding like a roaring tiger (hey she had a lion pictured on this bass!), and playing these low-toned loops all over the songs.
Wild energy is the key to describe what happened on stage with the trio, and if they delivered their fast songs with a sunny anger, they always stayed focused on the melody, without venturing into too much distortion or too much experimentation. The riffs were happy and jumpy, with a mean and sharp bass, vocals sometimes sung in female-male harmonies, and a constant explosion of sound moving like a urgent race toward some imaginary finish line.
Happy tunes with engaged lyrics, and Hutch Harris turned all political when he began talking to the crowd which was chanting at one point ‘USA! USA! USA!’, ‘Yeah USA, the greatest country in the world!… You didn’t not vote for the weed’, he said just before rushing to their hand-clapping ‘We were sick’.
The crowd was really into it, showing their appreciation with loads of chorus singing, lots of jumping, dancing around, a few crowd surfing, some moshing in the front of the stage, but never turning too dangerous, the crowd always having a good time.
Although I am not familiar with their work, their set list taped on the stage was listing abbreviated titles of ‘I don’t believe you’, ‘Never Listen to Me’, ‘Not like any other Feeling’, and ‘Your love is strong’ from their Kill Rock Star 2010 album ‘Personal life’, as well as other older songs like ‘Returning to the fold’, ‘How we know’, ‘I Called out your name’, ‘Here’s your Future’, ‘I Might Need You To Kill’, ‘When I was Afraid, ‘A Pillar of salt’ among others.
They came back for an encore and finished the show with a cover of a Weezer’s song that I was not sure to recognize at first, but yes, it was …’My name is Jonas’… strange, it sounded so much like one of their own songs, so Weezer, beware!