Autobiography of a Fandom
Of three written entries to this blog, so far two will concern Thursday. I wish I wasn’t writing this one. It has taken a few days for it to really register, but I am now beginning to feel what it means for one of my most loved bands to have split. It’s horrible.
I came to Thursday later than most, missing ‘Full Collapse’ when everyone was being blown away by it and not finding them until their third album ‘War All The Time’. I picked up WATT at a point in my life when I was sans internet but was consuming music voraciously and buying albums on whims and passing recommendations, as many as my pay packet allowed a month. I put the album on the moment I got home and since then perhaps only Band of Horses’ ‘Cease to Begin’, have I put on a record and loved every track instantly.
I speedily got my hands on the previous two albums and rapidly fell in love with a band whom it had appeared had been making the music I wanted to hear for years. Urgent and sincere, Thursday songs have refrains, choruses and middle eights that make me want to bellow along like you only can at live shows, but while I was walking to work in the cold, or getting the last train back from a night out. They grew as I did, leaving behind the genre pigeonholes that their many impersonators remained in to make ‘A City By The Light Divided’ with the Flaming Lips’ Dave Fridmann, a great album that stretches what they had accomplished on FC and WATT sonically. It’s follow up ‘Common Existence’ reconciled this with more ambitious song writing that made CE in many ways their most complete album. The thumping breakdown and outro on ‘Circuits of Fever’ still raises the hairs on my arms.
Thursday fostered an attitude that along with AFI introduced me to bands working as and within communities, they showed me what a DIY ethic meant, and allowed you and your peers to accomplish if you got your priorities right as you set about making art of your own.
Rickly’s lyrics and delivery make the band unique, his singing can be off-key at times but it matters not a jot, beautiful imperfections only render the sentiment sung more human, more genuine. The tableau his lexicon paints bring the thunderous drums and spiraling guitars from the brilliant to the sublime. When on ‘Concealer’, an uncomfortable first-person narrative on domestic abuse, the guitars drop out and over the top of cavernous drums Rickly sings “The cadence beats down on the tar / it sounds the same as your fists raining down” a lasting impression is left.
I’ll forever miss their incendiary live shows (even the one with the man I hate), they never disappointed and gave their all whether in tiny side rooms or on Reading’s main stage. I’ll forever be grateful for the art I’ve been introduced to as a result of these guys name checking bands and books from Lifetime to José Saramago’s ‘Blindness’, not to mention the bands they helped put on the stage that I love, Murder By Death and My Chemical Romance.
They’ll always mean an immense amount to me, sound-tracking the years of post-education alienation and anger I felt as a young man, and the ensuing resolution as I met my amazing girlfriend, bonding over this band and many others together. I hope they produce great work as individuals and hope just as much that I’ll see them play live once more, their farewell tour comes nowhere near the UK. Fingers crossed Thursday will return one day when they guys feel it’s right and this can be something I can revisit.
It’s unlikely if you are reading this that you are not already a Thursday fan, but if you are not, I implore you take time to listen to one of the greatest bands of the last 13 years, you don’t know what you’re in for, you lucky person you. Thank you so very, very much Geoff, Tom, Tim, Tucker, Steve, Andrew and Bill, goodnight Thursday.
When the world is crashing down,
Part with it, start again.
When the world is crashing down,
These notes will fold themselves.
Standing at the margin’s edge
to see where the daybreak ends.
You can find compassion here,
But the page turns too fast.
