- Embryo Imbroglio
- Terrible Two
The music of the Baltimore, Maryland, band Thank You feels like some kind of gateway drug. Then again, it feels like it’s THE shit too. It feels like you’ve already gotten there and back, hit some sort of stride or second wind, and there you go again, right back into the fray once more. You just couldn’t get enough of it the first time and there’s money riding on the hunch that the second and third times will yield the same form of leaving unfulfilled. Or rather, it’s a form of just getting further tempted, for there are all kinds of fulfilling things going on as one listens to “Terrible Two,” a record that leaves so much of its interpretation up to the cosmos and you. Jeffrey McGrath, Michael Bouyoucas and Emmanuel Nicolaidis create music that exists in the seam between stubborn art and primitive connection, a place that requires a suspension of some of the normal processes of the brain and an emphasis on the processes that turn on the smoke machines, allow important bits to get overheated and throw war paint all over the premises and let everything sway towards warping. It’s a fuzzily construed romping of electronic buffet and an instrumental maddening that makes for a haunted hayride through an abandoned metropolitan street. It’s stimulus after stimulus, an outpouring of ideas that sweat and thrum, bend and break, collide into one another and let the majority of the speaking exist in some kind of code. It’s a code that is like a tub of bathwater that only occasionally is comfortable, but frequently gets freaky while you’re trying to bathe. Without warning, it’s as if Thank You is piping scalding water into the gallons of drink encasing your naked body and then, just as suddenly, some phantom dry ice is dropped in to shift the sensation to the other side of the needle. All the while, you remain in the tub, for you remain intrigued and invested in just what these three men are going to make you feel next.