‘To Be Everywhere Is To Be Nowhere’ is the eighth studio album from post-hardcore Demi-Gods, Thrice. That #makeuthink title comes from the advice a Roman philosopher gave to a friend to ease up on his book habit (really) and focus on fewer, better authors. Quality over quantity. Its deployment here, however, alludes to the modern obsession with mobile technology and, in the words of drummer Riley Breckenridge, “the capability to be everywhere, but…so buried in that ability that [people] leave the moment”.
That philosopher (for whom this album’s 60-second interval track is named) was forced to commit suicide by Emperor Nero. Thrice, on the other hand, have seemingly been reborn with every album they’ve released since and including ‘Vheissu’. That pattern continues on ‘To Be Everywhere…’, which sees the band return to a collaborative musician-producer relationship not used since the divisive 2005 classic, with spectacular results.
Opener ‘Hurricane’ folds shades of Pixies and The Flaming Lips under, by turns, walls of guitars, restrained dynamics and thundering drums. The polished edges of a band being pushed to think about their art is immediately obvious, perhaps nowhere so much as on the radio-ready chorus of instant classic ‘Blood On the Sand’. Crucially, though, the band’s identity shines through every riff, every beat, every throat-straining note that issues forth from Dustin Kensrue inimitable vocal chords.
By turns reigning in and indulging the band’s tendency to follow their creative instincts down whichever rabbit hole they happen to choose, Eric Palmquist has facilitated the creation of a record which both showcases everything fans have come to love about Thrice and represents a giant step forward for them. And, most importantly, it feels like an album.
There’s a journey; an old-school ‘Side A/Side B’ experience, the second half of which kicks off with ‘Black Honey’, simply one of the best songs the band have ever written. If the album’s first half is an anxious walk through an unknown neighbourhood, the second’s a nerve-calming rendez-vous which releases the building tension into cascades of distorted guitars and major chords.
The Thrice with which most fans fell in love is most present on ‘Death From Above’ – alarmingly so, given what’s come before; the nuanced brutality of ‘The Artist in the Ambulance’ locking horns with the interweaving guitars of ‘Major/Minor’ in explosive fashion.
In many ways, ‘To Be Everywhere is to be Nowhere’ is the distillation of all that Thrice have created as a band. To be everything is to be, rather than nothing, everything they’ve been threatening to be since the Morse code which opened Vheissu’s first track. In a year whose first five months have already yielded more great albums than the whole of 2015 combined, Thrice have just raised the bar, forged it into a gauntlet and then thrown it down.
ROB BARBOUR