The best things about Thrice are completely unrelated to their music. The members themselves are fairly smart characters, the main guitarist is classically trained (most obvious on earlier material), and they remind me of Vanilla Wafers. The band itself is a fairly amorphous post-hardcore act that strives on concepts created in other, better bands and of course their fans eat it up because of the name on the label. Thrice does have one redeeming quality though, and that’s due to the fact that they are modest and hardworking, you can’t deny that, but it’s too bad they’re just not interesting at all.
Right off the bat you’re greeted with Thrice ripping themselves off for a change. All The World Is Mad harkens back to their Artist In The Ambulance days with its U2 vocal style and Thursday riffs (and don’t forget repetitiveness), yet unfortunately never fulfills the colorfully bleak atmosphere it aims for. The Weight is at least a different, folk rock sound, but the mumbley vocal performance, which happens fairly often throughout the record, is pretty annoying. It tries to be innovative by combining polar opposite amp presets over each other, which happen to be mixed off balanced, further making continuing the listen a hard choice. Frankly the first half of Beggars literally sounds like a bunch of safe homages to other bands, and the problem with this is how watered down they made everything. At least on The Alchemy Index’s softer moments they knew what minimalism meant, but here they do it as if they’re on the radio.
Speak of the devil, here’s In Exile, the most inoffensive song they’ve ever written that belongs in the late 90’s. Whoever took charge of songwriting on this album must be really bored, so it’s probably Dustin judging by his vocals thus far. The organ was a nice touch but it happens to be one of those “too little too late” occurrences. To bring some light on this record, Wood & Wire, minus the vocals, is a fairly solid track with an overall oceanic flow, something they never grasped on their Alchemy outing. The heavily wavey guitar effects add a great touch to what the song wants to convey and the guitar sound is very hollow, and rightfully so. It’s songs with a purpose, like this one, that Thrice should be trying to write, but then they just revert back to post-hardcore generalities with Talking Through Glass…and why do the intros to The Great Exchange and Beggars sound exactly the same?
While Beggars is an album with continuity, its quality is questionable. The formats for the song arrangements are virtually all equal, the band makes no leaps towards anything substantial, and while this may be due to the higher experimentation of the past few outings, that’s no excuse for laziness. Sure people who are into bands like The Dear Hunter will love it but, unlike Thrice’s future career, I will always hold a soft spot for Vanilla Wafers…Thrice, there just isn’t enough room for mediocrity.
