Photo: Brantley Gutierrez
Thursday wsg The Dillinger Escape Plan, Fake Problems, Endless Hallway
The Intersection, Grand Rapids
Dec. 10, doors at 6 p.m.
$16 advance, $17.50, day-of
Listening to Thursday albums is like watching the movie The Sixth Sense. You have to experience both over and over again to fully understand what's going on. And after almost 12 years as a band, it's something Geoff Rickly has accepted of Thursday.
"I remember when War All the Time came out, somebody at our record label said, ‘There are first listen records, and some records are third listen records...This is a tenth listen record,'" said the singer. "I think we used be almost a little offended by that one...It's just sort of something we've accepted as that you really have to put a lot of investment in our records before they make sense."
For the past decade, Thursday has released albums filled with songs that have unusual music patterns, singing and lack of melodies - quite the opposite of the constructed verse/chorus/verse pop and rock songs frequently played on the radio.
"Sometimes we don't have melodies in songs, other times the melodies are strange and you can't really figure out what they are at first," Rickly said. "We don't write a lot of love songs, stuff like that for people to really connect to. It makes sense to me that we're not really a first listen band."
This year, the post-hardcore band released its fifth album, Common Existence, to many positive reviews.
"We've been really lucky to have a bunch of smart critics give this record a listen, and really pay attention enough to get what we were going for. And I think there are great records that never get listened to in a great way by critics," said Rickly, who lists Wilco's latest album as one of those records panned by critics.
Rickly attributes the favorable reviews to the band's maturity and the "wave of young enthusiasm" wearing off. He lists his favorite songs from Common Existence as "Beyond the Visible Spectrum" and "Circuits of Fever," saying it was those songs that took the most amount of growth for him as a singer.
"I feel like we've been really lucky with [Common Existence]," he said. "Hopefully, every record you're refining, and you're growing, you're learning new tricks. You're opening your world to include more points of view and using more interesting narrative techniques...we're not trying to change the world with every record, but we're just trying to get closer to kind of our ideal version of what Thursday should be."
