Thrice Band • Page 226

The intro has got that Stranger Things flavor.

 

Not sure what to make of this but I’m glad they’re experimenting

 

Digging up an old topic here, but does the Beggars vinyl have a different sequence than other versions of the album?

Can't believe I haven't noticed this before, but I want to double check here from anyone who owns a copy.

 

Not that I've ever noticed while listening, but I'll double check my record soon ish.

 

Yeah my copy plays in normal sequence but it might be listed wrong on the cover which would be weird, I'll have to check.

 

Pretty sure that’s right. I remember wood and wire closing out side A

 

I remember it being like that on the cover, but for some reason can't remember if it plays like that, but I think it does.

 

Emery did that on their last record and I thought my record skipped two songs I was very confused ha

 

Jk disregard me, my blue splatter repress isn’t in that order. I wonder if it’s just the original vinyl?

 

Yeah, it's just the original. Can't believe I got that off of eBay for 30 bucks signed back then and now it's going for 300.

 

I'll need to check that out. I just popped in here to say that "Stay" is slowly becoming one of my favorite Thrice songs.

 

In a smaller thread, a user asked why I liked Major/Minor so much. I spent a good amount of time on my response, so for anyone else who might be curious, I figured I'd post it in here, too:

So, from Thrice's perspective, Major/Minor is very similar to Beggars. It's interesting that so many people seem to love Beggars and dislike M/m when the entire promotional narrative leading up to the latter's release was that the band had never made so small of a stylistic leap between albums. I personally see so many similarities between the two albums that I'm sometimes tempted to think that M/m is a rehash, even though my ultimate analysis is that M/m is marginally the stronger album. (For example, both albums have track 1's about human depravity, track 2's about marriage, track 3's about not seeing what's in front of you, etc.) But I certainly think it's a bigger and more muscular album. It's Thrice's first album with an outside producer since Vheissu, and the producer is actually the guy who engineered Vheissu. I'm also pretty sure that it's Thrice's first album since The Illusion of Safety to primarily be limited to the sounds of a four-piece rock band: two guitars, bass, and drums. TAITA was filled with strings and bells and whistles, Vheissu and Alchemy had such a large array of instruments, and Beggars was fairly keys-heavy. Outside of "Listen Through Me," which contains some piano (and is, in my opinion, M/m's weakest track), I think it's easy to point to M/m as the album that best represents Thrice's live show. Most of the album was even recorded live, and I think that authentic energy translates really well onto the record.

But whether or not you agree that M/m is a good-sounding or well-produced album ultimately doesn't matter if you don't like the songs. So, what do I like about the songs? On an instrumental level, I'd be shocked if anyone thought this album wasn't Riley's most impressive showcase. His work on nearly every song is out of this world, especially "Blinded" and "Call it in the Air." As for the guitar work, it's not nearly as showy, but it seems to me that they really learned to focus on parts and riffs that support the songs rather than distract. There's more of a focus on movements and dynamics and chord progressions that on Teppei's classic hammer-ons and riffs. For example, one of the coolest and most impressive riffs on the album comes during the pre-chorus of "Promises," but it's super easy to miss precisely because it sits so snugly beneath Dustin's vocals. And then the big, instrumental outros of "Promises" and "Blinded" are such a great appropriation of the types of ending they tried out on Beggars, such as "Circles" and "In Exile." I would understand the argument that Thrice seem to be copying themselves or repeating old tricks, especially when we as fans are so used to them being innovators, but I take this as Thrice developing a really cool musical tactic and reapplying it in new contexts.

Concerning the song structures, I think there's a surface-level-extent to which these songs seem like the band's most straightforward pre-hiatus compositions. They're not nearly as straightforward as the radio-ready, highly structured tracks on TBEITBN, but they're close -- in fact, M/m seems like a pretty logical stepping stone from Beggars to TBEITBN, in my opinion. Nevertheless, when you dig a little deeper, there are a lot more complex and interesting things going on in M/m's songs then first meets the eye. There are actually only TWO tracks that follow the traditional Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus structure, both of which appear near the end of the record: "Listen Through Me" and "Anthology." The preceding eight tracks are an adventurous bunch, bucking trends at every turn. A lot of them follow Thrice's favorite song structure, Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Outro, a structure that every song on Water and many songs on Beggars follow, but here, they follow this pattern in ways that are fairly new to the band. Take "Blur," for example. Sure, it goes from verse 1 to chorus 1 to verse 2, but that journey into the second verse takes you out of the album's heaviest track and throws you into a soft, subdued soundscape reminiscent of Vheissu's "Between the End and Where We Lie." Or there's "Call it in the Air," which takes an interesting twist on this structure by teasing the epic and heavy outro by using it as an instrumental interlude between the first chorus and second verse. Other songs decry normal song structures altogether. I'd be shocked if anyone could chart out the song structure of "Cataracts," which is filled with twists and turns and has almost nothing that repeats lyrically. The pieces of that song flow in and out of one another with surprising ease. Or then there's "Treading Paper," my favorite song, which starts with a soft verse, moves into a second verse before going into a grooving chorus, only to switch in a straight beat that then reimagines the first verse in driving fashion.

Moving on to Dustin's work, specifically, I think "Treading Paper" is one of his greatest sets of lyrics and one of his greatest vocal performances, and it's also the start of one of my favorite three-track-runs in music history, one that I think shows how cohesive the album is both musically and thematically. The huge build to the ending of "Treading" leads beautifully into the heavy guitars and time signature shifts of "Blur." Then you get nearly a minute of silence at the start of "Words in the Water," which allows for enough time to come off of "Blur" and prepare for the softness and beauty of "Words," which is absolutely stunning in how it moves through its 5/4 time signature, how it re-contextualizes the same melodies over different chord progressions to create new feelings, and how Dustin sings through a very difficult and poetic rhyme scheme, which he would later re-use on "Salt and Shadow." Those lyrics are seriously a work of art, and not only does the mention of "treading water" tie it into the images and themes of "Treading Paper," but one of its most triumphant lyrics, "I saw white and black reverse and a lifting of a curse," is a direct answer to the main line from "Blur": "Black and white blur into one." The ways these songs speak to each other is a perfect argument for how a good album is better than the sum of its parts.

I'll say one last thing -- I've seen a very interesting pattern that it tends to be Christians who really love M/m, and it tends to be non-Christians who don't love it. That might be too large of a generalization to make, but it's what I've seen. And there might be a very real extent to which I can relate to the lyrics of "Blinded" and "Disarmed" and others in a way that non-Christians can't. If M/m can be called a Christian rock album, then I'd argue that it's one of the best Christian rock albums of all time, but I also know that not even the members of Thrice (particularly the Breckenridge bros.) agreed with all these lyrics. I'd even bet that Dustin doesn't agree with many of them anymore. (In my opinion, the lyrics of "The Grey" and "Branch in the River," as well as potentially "Beyond the Pines," seem like a very specific attempt to ret-con the lyrics of "Words in the Water.") Nevertheless, I'm always interested in hearing what specifically makes these lyrics so hard to like from a non-Christian perspective, when so many of Thrice's lyrics over the years have come from a Christian perspective. (Even many fan favorites, from "Deadbolt" to "Of Dust and Nations" to "Come All You Weary," contain explicit quotes from the Bible.) But for me and for some other Christians I know who also love M/m, the lyrics of this album are true and insightful and inspiring and life-giving in a way that goes above and beyond any other album in Thrice's discography.

I know this is a lot, but thanks again for asking, thanks for reading, and even if your opinion about M/m never changes, I hope I've been able to provide some insight about why some people love Major/minor.

 

I like you.

 

I think The Grey is more about leaning into the grey where scripture is grey. Many many churches and denominations add on rules or say “x” is sin when the Bible does not actually teach that.

Knowing that Dustin’s theology and experience were heavily shaped by the reformers and that he ended up at Mars Hill, and then left says a lot to me. MH would make statements that logically made sense from scripture, but ultimately weren’t scripture. To me The Grey is about moving on from the rigid additional structure/rules churches put in place that aren’t biblical. It is a balance to be a Christian. To be in the world and not of it. Many tend to choose one over the other, trying to live it as it’s stated would be a “new way”.

Branch to me doesn’t negate Words in the Water at all. What makes you think that?

The only lyrics that I find to potentially contradict his former theology is Beyond the Pines.

 

Also, I have been going through their discography this week and while I used to agree M/m was better than Beggars, I do not believe that now. Beggars is stronger to me, for sure.

It doesn’t help that the run of Cataracts/Call It/Treading is one of my least fav run of Thrice songs, maybe ever.

 

I also listened through the whole discography last week and Beggars has aged really well with me, to where I'm closer than ever to considering the two albums equals. I have a few gripes with it, though.

I've always understood when people don't care for Cataracts or Call It, but these past few weeks, I've probably been enjoying both more than I ever have in these past seven years.

Not like Treading though...it seriously baffles me. Not to be confrontational, but I'd love to hear why it's one of your least favorite songs. In my brain, I'm genuinely confounded that it isn't a widespread fan favorite.

 

It just falls flat to me. Out of all the times I hear it, it just kind of trudges along. I never feel engaged with it at any point.

 

Listen through me always struck me as the preachiest of all the THRICE songs.

For that reason, it has always been my least favorite THRICE song.

 

I like you too

 

Interesting. Can't argue with how you feel! Haha. "Trudging" is one of the ways I would describe "Listen" -- I've also described it as "droning." The bridge of "Listen" is the only part that thrills me.

 

Yeah, even as someone who fully agrees with its lyrics, I definitely get that it's super preachy. And as I've said, it's consistenly been my least favorite song from M/m. Yay for agreeing on things! Haha

 

I don’t mind Dustin injecting his faith into lyrics. I couldn’t be a fan of THRICE if I did. And I’ve often found those lyrics to be the most moving. But that song just crossed a line for me and it rubbed me the wrong way.

 

Cataracts fucks hard and the idea of not immensely enjoying it is a foreign one to me

 

I understand not liking it because it has that weird, almost Celtic feel to it. But otherwise I'm with you, I think it's a total banger

 

Totally understandable. So Thrice doesn't have any other songs that rub you wrong like that?