The Thermals – Personal Life

With their tinny, post-punk guitars and fragmented lyrical critiques of bible-belt America, Oregon three-piece The Thermals openly acknowledge their ideological and musical debt to the 90s – a more wide-eyed time when the 'alternative' moniker still carried a scrap of significance with it.

Fifth long-player Personal Life does little to change that stance; but where earlier triumphant releases More Parts Per Million or religious concept album The Body, the Blood, the Machine were firstly hot-blooded squall and then melody, this time out it’s the other way around; the easy groove on Never Listen to Me being an excellent example, fusing post-punk edginess with genuine soul.

Hutch Harris’s limited voice has always been an easy thing to relate to and never more so than on Personal Life, where the lyrics deal not with the big themes of albums past, such as religious hypocrisy, but with relationships and other real life minutia and detritus. A more ‘mature’ sound then, to use an often-abused phrase, but not in the sense of a once great young band going rank rotten with money grubbing, middle-of-the-road dirge, but in the sense of an already impressive group not just fulfilling its potential but soaring past it. [PJ Meiklem]