Review Summary: Stay true
For me there's a lot of nostalgia in listening to Thursday. For someone who was just entering their teenage years around the same time that they released
Full Collapse, there was no greater companion at the time than Geoff Rickly. His strained vocals, that in any other context would be looked down upon as something inferior, gave those of us that had stumbled upon the beginnings of the modern post-hardcore scene a sense of purpose, a sense of community in a post-9/11 landscape that was growing more and more distant and divided from everything that we wished it would be. This is why when earlier this year when Thursday announced that they would be playing their landmark 2001 release, a sea of early twenty-somethings leaped at the opportunity to relive those oh-so-fleeting moments of unity through the album that tied us all together.
It is through this lens, with
Full Collapse so recently re-etched in our minds, to which Thursday are releasing their sixth album
No Devolución . It is more than fitting. Besides
Full Collapse, no other Thursday album shares that same feeling of perfect cohesion, where every song feels like its more than just instruments put to tape, like each track is a living and breathing entity of its own. That's not to knock the albums that they put out in between, because not only were they more than admirable inclusions that helped cement Thursday's status for years to come, they were also stepping stones, inching us ever closer to what they would create here on
No Devolución, as the moods and themes visited across its twelve tracks all had their starts on previous albums. Take for example the album's emotional centerpiece “Empty Glass" which, besides the fact that it starts off in a manner that sounds exactly like Bright Eye's “Padraic My Prince”, blossoms into melancholy bloom of mournful synthesizers that feels like the big brother of
A City By the Light Divided's closing call for reflection “Autumn Leaves Revisited”. Even the album's heavier tracks, like opener “Fast to the End” and “Open Quotes”, feel connected to this same emotional wellspring which when taken in as a whole makes
No Devolución a complete work of post-hardcore beauty.
It's no surprise that even after fourteen years as a band Thursday could still pull off an album like
No Devolución that re-envisions everything that they have accomplished in that time in a new light without sounding like a retread of old ideas. By combining these previously worked on sounds in new ways Thursday have created an album that is not only new and unique, but also unmistakably their own.
