Where do I start with this one? If I had to name a single album that truly crystallized my love for heavy post-hardcore alternative rock it would be The Artist in the Ambulance. To say this is one of my favorite albums of all-time might be an understatement honestly. Considering everything it’s meant to me over the years this is certainly a “desert island” type album that sits right up there with Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run as a must-have for the hypothetical scenario where I would only have access to a limited number of sonic choices.
So what makes Thrice so great? Let’s start with what I said about them about a year ago when reviewing their debut album Identity Crisis:
If there’s one band who I’ve truly grown up with throughout the course of my life, enjoying every single one of their permutations and watching as their sonic evolution mirrored that of my own tastes, it is undoubtedly Thrice. Their career is one of epic scope, from their early SoCal skate punk meets Bay Area thrash meets pop punk sound that can be found on Identity Crisis, to their brutally heavy melodic hardcore masterpiece The Artist In The Ambulance, to the alternative rock revolution found within Vheissu, to the experimental bonafides of The Alchemy Index that took inspiration from each of the four elements (wind, water, fire, earth) to create an artistic landmark, to the more recent grunge focused direction of To Be Everywhere Is to Be Nowhere. Every step of the way they have constantly pushed themselves to reach new heights and explore different versions of themselves as a cohesive singularity.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that they have remained a core quartet with no lineup changes throughout their entire existence (Dustin Kensrue and Teppei Teranishi were high school friends before recruiting brothers Eddie Breckenridge and Riley Breckenridge to the band in their late teens). At the risk of being overtly sentimental, Thrice has been a steady guiding force in my own life through their creative output– their ability to transform into new skin while still remaining committed to their core principles in their pursuit of progress is admirable. Every Thrice album has a distinctly different sonic direction. And every single Thrice album sounds uniform. To do so in one fell swoop is an incredible accomplishment.
Which brings us to their magnum opus The Artist in the Ambulance. I still remember the first time hearing this album. I was a freshman in high school and one of my buddies had the CD that he decided to lend me out of the blue. As soon as I heard Dustin’s vocal line “They are sick, they are poor” blast through my headphones I was immediately hooked. This was a new version of Thrice exploding forth, blessed with a type of intensity and thoughtful songwriting that sounded like it was truly saying something.
Up to that point the band had put forth albums that kind of ping-ponged around sonic ground, but The Artist in the Ambulance had a clear focused direction that never veered off its intended target. It took all the emotional intensity of post-hardcore music and gave it a sense of grandeur. It wrestled with morality, war, and spiritual ambiguity in a way that made you think. It was powerful poetry. And most of all, it was thoughtful and provocative. There are plenty of great heavy bands that can shred. But it’s a rare breed that make you truly think and consider the meaning of life.
That’s what has always made Thrice great. They are a band who pushed my intellectual limits and made me take stock of the ideas they were expressing.
Standout Songs: “Cold Cash and Cold Hearts”, “Under A Killing Moon”, “All That’s Left”, “Stare At The Sun”, “Paper Tigers”, “The Melting Point Of Wax”, “The Artist In The Ambulance”, “The Abolition of Man”
