Compared to their mid-2000’s emo contemporaries, Thursday always felt mature beyond their years. Their subject matter wasn’t about shallow yearnings of lost love or feelings of victimhood that sort of defined the genre as a whole. They focused their energy toward discussing the horrors of war, frustrations of the working class, complexities in relationships, and sober self-reflection. Thursday is best listened with a lyric sheet (and an accompanying dictionary) considering that singer Geoff Rickly’s words read more like poetry than typical lyrics.
Darkness and depth is everywhere on War All The Time. The arrangements, blistering guitars, tuned snare drums, purposefully raw screams, and gritty production relentlessly pile on top of each other until you end up feeling like a 100-pound weight is pressed on your chest for 42-minutes. It’s an ugly record, visceral, a portrait of a bleak world much like Gotham City.
It’s purposefully not easy on the ears. Its goal is to make you uncomfortable in the dissonance.
And yet as the record progresses the mood gets slightly more hopeful. A subtle but noticeable shift takes place in “This Song Brought To You By A Falling Bomb” where a ray of light enters the picture. That feeling of hope amongst bleakness carries through until the end of the record, with the crescendo hitting in “War All The Time”.
This is a perfect example of a band tapping into its collective conscious to create something that makes you feel something. It may not be your cup of tea musically, but there should be zero question as to its purity.
Put another way, War All The Time is art in its absolute finest form.
Standout Songs: “Division St.”, “Steps Ascending”, “War all the Time”, “Tomorrow I’ll Be You”
