Thrice Brought Fire & Fury to Fillmore
Fillmore had just about the best night of rock all year this Tuesday. Post-hardcore/rock/all-of-the-above legends Thrice brought two up and coming excellent bands with them for a night of soaring choruses, velvety vocals and punishing riffs.
Opening the show was Tulsa’s Downward, a four-piece that sits at the crossroads between shoegaze and modern post-hardcore. The vocal delivery reminds one a whole lot of an almost bedroom-pop style, hushed croon, a melody you can just barely make out as guitars strum quietly underneath it. But with each song and each passage of quiet and ease came a crashing moment of release, an explosion of sound and chaos. This pin balling between those two dynamics was carefully executed and very memorable, careful navigating the pitfall that lots of shoegaze bands fall into live as songs bleeds into one another and become hard to distinguish.
Second up was LA’s Modern Color, a band that took a bit more of a full-force approach to presentation that Downward. The young melodic rockers sit in that comfortable zone between heavy and catchy, reminding one quite a bit of earlier Basement albums, a reverb-drenched echoing rock sound that echoes the grunge bands of yore. Modern Color definitely bring their own interpretation to it though, with vitriolic screamed vocals on closing (and most popular) track “Pale” setting them firmly in the hardcore side of rock than the alternative/shoegaze. Their short set was varied and interesting, the deep oceans of feedback married to harsh vocals and huge riffs. They like to let their chords really fill in the space of the venue, and because of this the band has this enormous live sound that kind of hits you in a way that you wouldn’t expect from their simple appearance. In a way, it’s a band that is very “heavy” without feeling excessively loud or abrasive, occupying a space on the musical spectrum somewhere between headbanging and relaxing. The final moments of “Pale” closed out and drummer Vince Nguyen practically tore his vocal chords belting out the final lines of the song, with one massive doom-metal sized riff bringing the room down right after - they absolutely nailed it, and left a huge impression.
Thrice joined the long list of bands I have seen this year that sit in the category of “really should have seen them sooner”. Their newest album, Horizons/West, was a little bit of a “return to form”, in the sense that Thrice have long followed whatever interested them, and moving away from a ‘heavier’ sound has miffed some fans (not myself, particularly). But listening to tracks like “Gnash”, which helped open the set up after first track “Blackout”, harkened back to that earlier, visceral sound of the mid 2000s that catapulted Thrice to relative stardom.
In the sense that they still have ‘it’, or however you want to refer to a band that has been chugging along for well over 20 years and still manifesting a powerful live performance, the answer is (obviously) yes. The Horizons/West tour displayed a deliberate visual motif that saw an emphasis on the music over the players, each member of the band deeply ensconced in shadow and silhoutte nearly throughout. As the crescendo at the end of “Blackout” built and built, lead guitarist Teppei Teranishi can be seen outlined by massive pulses of bright light, clearly dancing with the holy ghost. Placing the music firmly front and center instead of themselves, one was able to sit and enjoy the rich tapestry that is their discography.
They played songs from all across their time as a band, starting with aforementioned two tracks off Horizons/West but then jumping right into “The Artist in the Ambulance” off the album(s) of the same name. Their ability to dance between extremely disparate styles is probably their strongest quality, and their consistency at delivering those styles with precision and high energy is unparalleled.
The band closed with the very expected “Deadbolt” as the finale during their encore, the furious riff from Teranishi and a much more gravelly and confident Kensrue scream-singing “…What have I done?” to fade the track out - Thrice are still the band they’ve always been, delivering live performances with everything they’ve got and dancing between genres in such an effortless manner, and I left really marvelling at what a great abnd I had seen.
