U.K.’s Thank are not here to make things easy on you. Just try finding them with a standard Google search and see what happens. Even more elusive and obtuse than their web presence is their music. A trepidatious venture of sound. A tightrope walk on a wire made of unspooled animal tendons, stretched over a chasm filled with spinning lawnmower blades. Rusted by neglect and the blood of luckless would be dare-devils.
Their music isn’t inviting or accommodating, but it is extremely weird and designed to imperil one’s sense of comfort and security. Which, for some absurd reason, is exactly what many a connoisseur of art has come to crave. If this describes your own thick-witted pursuit of masochistic pleasures, then you can at least take solace in the fact that there are others who share your perverse interests. Including yours truly.
Keeping with the theme of never giving you quite what you expect, want, or believe you deserve, Thank’s first LP is actually a compilation. The album gathers together their 2017 and 2019 EPs, respectively Sexghost Hellscape and Please, and is capped off by their side of a 2018 split with Newcastle group Blóm, titled The Curse.
The whole thing is a bit of a teaser for a double LP to be released at some point in the distant, possibly, non-existent future, but it also works as a standalone statement. Despite being literally cobbled together from broken and discarded pieces of other releases, like a road made of houses that were collapsed during an earthquake, it all fits together pretty neatly and demonstrates a surprising unity of vision.
From the cabin-pressure losing, space-punk implosion of opener “Taxidermist,” to the agonizing, gas-huffing sear of “Petrol Head,” to the vicious Unsane-esque noisecore of “No Respect For The Arts,” Thank might change their style like a snake sheds its skin, but they will always manage to exhibit an absolute discomfort with the weighted flesh cloak of humanity we are each forced to shoulder and the maze of laughable pretenses we call a society.
The toothy glom of “Fragile Ego” mugs and struts like a bulldog that is barely able to keep its head from dragging on the ground after centuries of ancestral inbreeding. The blubbering lurch and convulse of “Thank The Universe,” contains howls of desire that din like they are being emanated from the singer Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe’s very bones, as if they were attempting to vibrate free of their flesh sheath.
And the cerebral bore of the electro-violence guided dance-punk of “Commemorative Coin” sounds like as if Suicide had entirely gone off their meds and wandered into a high school shop class and while inadvisably playing with the power tools had a strained, religious epiphany and converted to an esoteric wing of the Baháʼí faith. It’s a wonder no one was actually hurt during the recording of these tracks. Physically, that is. Not accounting for mental scars here.
Thank’s music is a lot like an early film from director David Fincher, or even some of his later entries like Gone Girl. It’s a glimpse of the world that is our own, but from an angle from which it shouldn’t be viewed. A view from this angle shows its flatness, its natural obscenity, and impossible incongruities.
Thankology is a window into a life of the mind that usually has its curtains pulled, and for a good reason. Breaking the glass, and letting in more sunlight only advances its corruption. Maybe it’s better off left in the shadows where it can only be found by the truly twisted. Be forewarned; witnessing what it has to offer may make you its evangelist. It happened to me. And it can happen to you, as well.
Cassette and CD copies of Thankology are available here.
