Release Date: Apr 12, 2011
Genre(s): Emo, Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Post-Hardcore, Screamo
Record label: Epitaph
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Review Summary: Stay trueFor 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.
Representing a serious sea change for post-hardcore/screamo outfit Thursday, No Devolución finds the band taking their normally frantic sound into more ethereal territories. While the band has worked with producer/sonic visionary Dave Fridmann in the past, it would seem that the third time really is a charm for the band. More so than on their other collaborations, the Fridmann/Thursday team-up seems to have really clicked this time around, with the spacy producer making his presence felt on the album.
Much like Deftones' paradigm-shifting White Pony or Thrice's Vheissu, post-hardcore group Thursday's latest, No Devolución, is a grand experience, full of depth and atmospheric subtleties that show off a new side to the group. Indeed, it is their most experimental, far-wandering album to date. The fact that the band wrote the album's 12 tracks in one week belies the music's intricacies.
It's still post-hardcore but not as you know it... Thursday’s last album ‘Common Existence’ closed with ‘You Were The Cancer’, moving from the full-throttle hardcore of earlier albums into a slower, more expressive sound that hinted at what would lie ahead for the band. As ‘Fast To The End’ rings out, the guitar surges are less hefty than the band’s back catalogue, and Geoff Rickly’s centrepoint vocals share only a history with ‘Full Collapse’ delivery methods, now executing controlled melody not screams.
Through a megaphone of enveloping reverb, Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly kick-starts his veteran band’s excellent new album with a strangely spacey chorus: “Ice crystals on the windscreen / You’re in the pilot’s chair.” Wicked stuff, man. Especially for Thursday, who have been, prior to 2011, the world’s finest (and least annoying) hardcore band. On No Devolución, album number six, Rickly and company decide to (finally) unleash their inner art-rock nerds.
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