The Artist in the Ambulance

Life is good when you open your freezer and see 3 containers of Breyers Reese’s ice cream.

In other news, I’ve had the new Thrice album (The Artist in the Ambulance) for about 3 weeks now.  There is only one way to describe this album: hard.  Really really hard.  It’s pure metal.  Their first 2 albums were hard, but not purely metal; there was a lot of less-heavy stuff, and a lot of non-yelling vocals.  There’s much less of that kind of variation on this album.

The first few times I listened to it, I was just like, "Wo.  It’s so metal.  Too metal."  It was boring.  But this third week of listening to it, my perception changed.  As I’m getting to know the songs better, the intricacies are becoming more noticeable, and I’m starting to love it.  It’s still pure metal, and really really hard, but it’s amazing metal.

With most music that I listen to, it takes a few listens for it to grow on me -- I often hate it the first couple times, and then end up loving it.  This album was just an extreme case of that; it took a few weeks instead of a few days for me to begin to really like it.  I was going to post last week and say, "I’m sad to have to report that the new Thrice album is just a crappy metal album."  I’m glad I gave it more time, because now I realize that it’s a superb metal album.

As an added bonus, the liner notes are individual sheets, one per song, and each one contains lyrics and commentary by each member of the band.  I read through them all the night I got the album, and I totally felt like I was there in the studio... it’s really neat and insightful, and I think all bands should definitely do this.  Here’s two of the blurbs from the notes on the song "All That’s Left:"

-i had some trouble with this song at first.  it’s pretty simple as far as structure and guitar parts and I’m so darn used to riffing my head off for the entirety of songs.  i couldn’t really get past the fact that the song is super strong without any crazy guitar parts or a screwed up structure cause i felt like i needed to do something more.  i got past that.  it’s probably one of the most memorable songs we’ve ever written and i’m very proud of it. T

- this was one of the first songs to be written for the record, but one of the last songs to be finished.  dustin came very close to killing me while working on this song, but i love where it ended up.  we added the megaphone to the second verse literally 10 minutes before we had to fed-ex the song to be mixed.  i’ll always remember dustin sitting next to me in the control screaming "treason" into a megaphone pressed up against his guitar pick-up. B

Also, there are really awesome photos on the front of each of the cards.  They’re random inner-city scenes and skylines and stuff, but with a really retro / grainy look to them, like they were developed a long time ago.

So all in all, I’m thoroughly impressed with this album.  The artwork/commentary/layout is super unique and interesting, and the music just rocks really really hard.  If you like metal, and/or earlier Thrice albums, I think you’ll like this album a lot.