| Kill the House Lights | 10.30.07 (Victory Records) | ||
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| Album Review: A lot has happened since Thursday helped usher in the summer of screamo way back in 2002. While the core line-up remains the same, the band has outlasted countless musical trends (including the one it helped catalyze), label changes and, maybe most traumatizing, has been forced to watch the bands it inspired, like My Chemical Romance, ascend to mainstream stardom.The documentary portion of Kill The House Lights is far more than a traditional tour video, running nearly two hours long and chronicling the band’s history from its humble beginnings in New Brunswick, New Jersey to playing arenas alongside the Cure. Told by the band members themselves as well as those close to the group (a cast which, in full disclosure, includes this writer), the story is most successful because it isn’t the least bit self-congratulatory.In fact, after watching the documentary, it’s clear that Thursday is its own worst critic.The CD portion of the album contains three songs, all of which are impressive (most notably “Ladies and Gentleman: My Brother, The Failure,” which features a cameo from Cursive’s Tim Kasher), as well as live songs, demos and remixes, which should tide the band’s fans over until the next full-length. While it seems like every band these days is releasing DVDs, Kill The House Lights not only affirms Thursday is still active, but also shows it’s probably more relevant now than ever. -Jonah Bayer, 2007 Album Article: Album Credits: Other Information: Steve Pedulla helped produce the DVD as he has history in film making. |
Album Lyrics: | A City By The Light Divided | 05/02/2006 (Island Records) | ||
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| Album Review: Times change, trends end and especially in the realm of popular culture, fame doesn’t usually last longer than its five-minute expiration date. Luckily, Thursday aren’t that kind of band. Even though the summer of screamo is still far from a footnote in the annals of music history, Instead of making a last ditch effort to capitalize on the trend the band helped bring to the mainstream, with A City By The Light Divided, the men of Thursday have once again transcended the genre.Formed in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1997, Thursday—vocalist Geoff Rickly, guitarists Tom Keeley and Steve Pedulla, bassist Tim Payne and drummer Tucker Rule—started out as part of a basement culture that also birthed bands like Midtown and Taking Back Sunday.After releasing their debut album Waiting in 1999, the members dropped out of Rutgers to pursuer their musical careers full-time, touring non-stop for the next few years and building a fanatical fanbase. The band’s breakthrough came when the video for “Understanding In A Car Crash” (off 2001’s Full Collapse), got picked up by MTV and after a headlining stint on 2002’s Warped Tour, the band found a new home at Island Records who released the band’s critically acclaimed third disc War All The Time in 2003 (which featured the additional of keyboardist Andrew Everding).However, despite numerous magazine covers and a tour with the Cure that came in the album’s wake, Thursday seemed to disappear in the second half of 2005, fueling rumors of an imminent breakup.In fact, in many ways A City By The Light Divided is the album that saved Thursday. “We took four months off last year to decide what we wanted to do and how much of a commitment we wanted to make and we all decided we wanted to do this full-time,” Rickly explains. “But in order to do that, we had to make a record that we think is startling and amazing and beautiful and brilliant. If we don’t do something that destroys everything else we’ve ever done, we just can’t make anything record.”A City By The Light Divided is undoubtedly that album. Produced by Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev) at Tarbox Studios in Fredonia, New York, songs like “At This Velocity” may be equal parts singing and screaming, but it’s anything but screamo. It’s aggressive, sure, but with its lilting half-time breakdown and shimmering keyboards, it’s also progressive—and accurately sets the tone for what follows it. IN fact, if it weren’t for Rickly’s distinctive vocals, cynics would be hard-pressed to recognize the driving and impassioned “Telegraph Avenue Kiss” as a Thursday song.However, it’s that kind of gradual growth which has defined the band throughout their transition from a hardcore band to the innovative rock act they’ve become today. While Fridmann may seem like an unlikely choice for a band who still incorporate breakdowns and sing-alongs into their music, Thursday’s penchant for making seemingly unorthodox choices is one of the reasons the band’s popularity hasn’t wanted in the past three years while so many of the group’s more predictable peers have vanished into obscurity.“Yeah, a lot of people were surprised we recorded with Dave instead of a ‘heavy’ producer,” Rickly admits. But listening to the disc, it’s obvious the man who layered sonic textures with the Flaming Lips and Sleater-Kinney was the perfect person to combine Thursday’s eclectic influences—which range from instrumental acts like Explosions In The Sky to technical metal acts like the Dillinger Escape Plan to writers like Octavio Paz and Jonathan Lethem. The complete realization of all these seemingly disparate influences is what makes Rickly describe the band’s latest disc as “the album we tried to make with War All The Time.”Let’s face it, “next big things” are generally overrated. The term itself implies impermanence; no one uses that phrase to refer to, say, a band like U2. While Thursday are still in the relatively infant stage of their existence, that’s the kind of career trajectory they’re aiming for—A City By The Light Divided is just the vehicle bringing them one step closer to realizing that dream. - Jonah Bayer Album Article: Thursday originally toyed with the idea of double album to follow up War All The Time, but scrapped that idea, reporting on their website that not even. The Beatles could properly fill two discs with enough worthy material. Dave Fridmann-produced A City by the Light Divided followed War All the Time and is Thursday’s first full-length album not produced by Sal Villanueva. The title is influenced by a poem from Octavio Paz–Rickly combined two lines from one of his poems to create the title. The album was officially previewed on the band’s MySpace on April 18, 2006, and officially released May 2 on Island Records in American and Hassle Records in the UK. A City by the Light Divided spawned two singles, “Counting 5-4-3-2-1″ and “At This Velocity”, though the latter received considerably less attention. Album Credits: Other Information: |
Album Lyrics: | War All The Time | 09/16/2003 (Island Records) | ||
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| Album Review: While the number of youthful groups of men in form-fitting T-shirts performing pensive, often anguished post-hardcore music punctuated with arty lyrical references has become overgrown and/or ridiculous in the past few years, New Jersey’s Thursday deserves props for putting all of its fragile eggs in a huge, well-appointed major-label basket. War All the Time, its Island debut, arrives grandiose and gatefolded, with moody, urban impressionist artwork and a thank-you list that lasts for miles. Helmed by longtime Thursday producer Sal Villanueva and mixed by Rumble Fish, the album rocks on the dynamics between singing and screaming, between rage unleashed and thoughts cast inward.Lyrically, the band’s earnestness is admirable. “In the spring, you will bloom, like her heart”; “We’ll douse ourselves in gasoline and hang our bodies from the lampposts” — coupled with musings on suicide and life’s never-ending grind, vocalist Geoff Rickly and his mates are providing diary material for 10,000 lonely teenagers. But despite its righteous gospel, startling dynamic shifts, and hurtling minor-chord choruses, War inevitably begins to resemble one long, 40-minute song. Touches of programming, plenty of overdubs, and some piano do help to separate things, especially on the raw, dirge-like “This Song Brought to You By a Falling Bomb,” a respectable brother to U2’s “October.” But an identically spiraling guitar line twists its way through both “Asleep in the Chapel” and “Steps Ascending,” and despite his emotional delivery and obvious erudition, Rickly’s bloodied-knuckle lyricisms start to run together over the endlessly crushing mid-tempos. The framework of the new, thinking man’s hardcore movement that Thursday marches in is guided by the principles of its martial predecessor. Uniformity in style and the common themes of disaffection and social rebellion have always rallied the youth around the records. But as more and more groups climb out of the steadily glowing underground embers and bask in the glow of major-label fireworks, that signature sound is becoming dangerously homogenized. Credit Thursday with an album that doesn’t dilute its lyrics or fervor. But in the quest for a new musical rebellion, the song is starting to remain the same. - Johnny Loftus, All Music Guide Album Article: Thursday toured extensively to support War All the Time through many dates with acts such as AFI, Thrice, and Coheed and Cambria. On these tours, Thursday performed many in-store acoustic sessions at various Tower Records stores and other record stores. The band also recorded a live acoustic session for Y100 Sonic Sessions, a radio program on the now defunct Philadelphia-based radio station, Y100. The live acoustic version of single “Signals Over The Air” was used on Y100 Sonic Sessions Volume 8. Following War All The Time, the band released two EPs. The first was Live From The SoHo & Santa Monica Stores Split EP and sold exclusively on iTunes; the second was a promotion found in Revolver Magazine, Live In Detroit EP. The band went on an indefinite hiatus in 2004 but returned once again for a charitable cause to save New York City’s CBGB, on August 25, 2005. This performance was streamed live through the CBGB’s website. At this show they performed two new songs that wouldn’t end up on A City By The Light Divided. One is yet to be released, while the other is featured on the upcoming release Kill The House Lights. It is entitled “Dead Songs”, and while the song itself is pretty much the same, the lyrics are dramatically different in each version. Album Credits: Other Information: Full Length - 42:00 |
Album Lyrics: | Five Stories Falling | 10/22/2002 (Victory Records) | ||
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| Album Review: The release of Thursday’s Five Stories Falling EP offered a convincing argument for the New Brunswick, NJ, band’s status as true comers in the hardcore rock hierarchy and unequivocally proved their mastery at creating tumultuous, anthemic emo-rock, built upon a fiercely confrontational affront and a melodic subtextual base. Albeit, Cure influences are readily palpable throughout (most apparent in the leadoff track, “Autobiography of a Nation”), the five-cut disc (featuring four live tracks from their 2001 Full Collapse CD, and one unreleased studio recording) showed Thursday’s astonishing ability to completely captivate a live audience while also allowing for a fully realized demonstration of their cathartic guitar-heavy sound, replete with sentimental takes on impending death (”Standing on the Edge of Summer”) and unreserved, freely vented rage (”Jet Black New Year”). - Roxanne Blanford, All Music Guide Album Article: Album Credits: Other Information: Full Length - 23:46 |
| Full Collapse | 04/10/2001 (Victory Records) | ||
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| Album Review: Thursday displays a peerless version of the emo sound for a music scene that may not be ready for what the band has to offer. Full Collapse starts out with a warm, day dreamt piece, “Understanding in a Car Crash,” that might give listeners a feeling that they are listening to a more modern, upbeat version of the Cure. While generating intelligent music, Thursday does its best to skirt the line of emo-pop without being unexciting or blasé. The key to this possibility lies behind the music that Thursday creates. Lead singer Geoff Rickly’s vocals are smooth yet not immature, strong while not being overbearing. Icy sharp backup screams catch the listener off guard. The melodic-to-crunchy guitars followed by the well-engineered drum sound and rhythmic bass only add to the fray.Tracks such as “Cross Out the Eyes” lull the listener with the thought that Thursday may be another in a long line of monotonous emo-pop bands; however, at the appropriate moment the guitars start to feedback and the screams kick in. Taking emocore up a notch, Thursday is not afraid to develop a sound that the independent music scene has been in favor of for quite some time. Full Collapse is a breath of fresh air and has the potential to be liked by fans of harder music everywhere. -Kurt Morris, All Music Guide Album Article: The band’s newfound popularity and disgust with the label led to internal problems that bred the Five Stories Falling EP, a release the band used to fulfill contractual obligations with Victory Records. At live shows, the band routinely told fans not to purchase the EP, but instead to download “Jet Black New Year”, the one new song found on the EP amidst live performances of four Full Collapse songs and the first song created since Full Collapse, a time during which the band almost broke up. Album Credits: Other Information: Full Length - 42:30 |
Album Lyrics: | Waiting | 01/18/2000 (Eyeball Records) | ||
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| Album Review: No Review.
Album Article: Thursday was formed in 1997 by vocalist Geoff Rickly, guitarist Tom Keeley, guitarist Bill Henderson, bassist Tim Payne, and drummer Tucker Rule. Keeley recounts foundation of the band: “Tucker and I used to get together on weekends when we didn’t have school and just kind of kick around little two minute hardcore songs on our really crappy equipment. We’d hang out in his attic, and just try really hard to fool ourselves into thinking we were good. I guess we did that for like four months and actually started learning how to play our instruments. Right around that time I met Geoff at an Ink and Dagger show, and asked him if he wanted to come to the “practices” and work on lyrics. Tim, I met in a figure drawing class. For a while my other friend from high school, Bill played with us..we recorded Waiting with him. After a while he realized that he was not going to be able to commit to touring because of school, and through a mutual friend of all of ours we met Steve. ” The band began playing basement shows in New Brunswick and surrounding New Jersey and New York areas. The band played their first official show on December 31, 1998 in Rickly’s basement alongside Midtown, Saves the Day and Poison the Well. They recorded demos to hand out at shows, and in the summer of 1999, they teamed up with MP3.com for their first official release, the 1999 Summer Tour EP, which featured demos of songs that would be soon be found on their debut album, Waiting, released January 18, 2000, on northern New Jersey-based Eyeball Records without any singles nor radio or television support. Album Credits: Other Information: Full Length - 33:47 |
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