The Thermals “Desperate Ground”
Many people might find the good in this album and somehow write this spectacular review, glorifying it as the second coming or something, but I’ve never really been that person.
I first heard The Thermals back in 2006 when they released “The Body The Blood The Machine”. I wrote a review for that album somewhere and now it just lingers in cyberspace, waiting to perhaps one day be found when people with smart enough computers care to find it.
My biggest problem with this album is that in writing a review for “Desperate Ground”, I feel like I’d just be rehashing a lot of what I already wrote in that review seven years ago. The Thermals still have that certain garage rock sound with those particularly distinct vocals, yes, but there really isn’t much else to report.
Bands are always told they need to grow and evolve as musicians. For many bands, that doesn’t work. When making an album and unsure of its potential, then finding success with it, it becomes even harder to duplicate that success. If you try to make something successful, odds are you’ll fail (Unless you have super Beatles-like powers) and if you say “Well, what I did on the last album worked, let me just do it again on this album” you run the very high risk of people not being able to tell the difference and thus they don’t care.
But this is neither the time nor the place to dissect why and how bands can have multiple albums while others can’t. I firmly believe people will listen to any album Aerosmith realizes because those people just don’t have strong enough ears to be turned off by Steven Tyler’s screeching vocals.
The Thermals have managed to walk a fine line between putting out the same album over and over and not really being hated on for it because, well, they continue to make albums. For fans of The Thermals, they must just be happy to hear any songs this band makes, even if some of them you can only really tell apart by the vocals.
With six studio albums under their belt, that is quite a feat for any band. I firmly believe The Thermals to be one of those great bands that can overcome the idea of putting out the same album repeatedly while yet seemingly doing just that.
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