>>PREVIEW
THUNDERBIRDS ARE NOW!
Friday, October 6
Broken City
Ryan Allen, the 26-year-old vocalist and guitarist for Detroit’s spastic pop-rockers Thunderbirds Are Now! (TAN!), acquired a solid sense of rhythm and a thick skin during a summer dance camp as a kid. After performing to a Kid ’N Play song at a school function, he and his dance partner excitedly marched off to a weekend camp. On the last day, they woke up with Fruit Roll Ups stuck to their legs by their peers who were focused on the apparently more manly arts of painting and drawing.
The good-natured front man jokes how the cajoling continued when he started Thunderbirds Are Now!. At the beginning of their career, Allen admits that they fully stunk. Detroit audiences are notoriously tough, and didn’t give their young hometown boys any slack, barraging the young band with insults during gigs. Instead of one member addressing the hecklers, all members of the band yelled back at their audience at the same time.
"It was ‘fuck you because we’re getting your money.’ Or something like that," laughs Allen. "Why’d you pay for the show? Stupid things like that. But we were a lot younger then. Now it’s like, the more humble we can be, that’s the way to go."
While Thunderbirds Are Now! began four years ago, they broke through with last year's long player Justamustache. It was a critically-acclaimed album that was well received by fans and fellow musicians alike, including Syd Butler (Les Savy Fav, owner of Frenchkiss Records) and John Schmersal of Enon and Brainiac fame. Schmersal wanted to participate in Make History, the quartet's highly-anticipated fourth album and second release on Butler's Frenchkiss label. Schmersal eagerly took over production duties for the album that melds the band's traditionally dense sonic freakouts to hooky pop melodies. A departure from the dance punk mania of Justamustache, Make History taps into more memorable and lasting influences from the quartet's youth.
"I wouldn’t call myself the main songwriter, but as the person that does contribute to the core of most of the songs… it wouldn’t be true to myself to make another record like (Justamustache) because at the time it was something that I was going through. A phase. I feel like Make History is the aftermath of that phase and is me and the rest of the band figuring out how we make a record that doesn’t just feel like it’s made in a certain era, or feel like it was part of one little movement and now that movement seems to be sort of over.
"To me, it had a lot to do with being honest with the kind of music that we wanted to make – not stopping ourselves from doing anything. I felt the last time, ‘is this too poppy let’s throw something fucked-up in there’ and now it’s like ’is this too poppy, no it’s not poppy enough.’ When we did Justamustache, it was honest, that’s what we wanted to do. It wasn’t like, ‘how can we make people think we’re good? Oh, we’ll fuckin’ be a dance punk band.’ It came out of me getting more into the Talking Heads and discovering Gang of Four – that kind of thing. Now that I have gone through that, what’s the next step that’s from our hearts and honest? That is what Make History is."
Even though the new album is far more pop than its predecessor, Allen has no doubt in his mind that the live show will continue to be the spectacle the band is famous for. Maybe it was the unforgiving initiation given by the Detroit school of hard knocks or maybe it’s the showmanship learned in dance camp, but TAN! are renowned for their live performance. It usually includes keyboardist Scott Allen (Ryan’s brother) wildly jumping around, climbing the rafters of the venue or organizing the audience into a straight line. Both band and audience are worked into a frenzy.
"We haven’t really discussed it or anything, but I feel like, I’ll use the Replacements as a perfect example of a band (that was fronted by) one of the best songwriters of all time, Paul Westerberg. They could be very clean and well delivered songs on record, but live things can manifest themselves in ways that you can’t control. You hear all these stories about how the Replacements were just this totally ramshackle junk band. It’s not like we’re like that, but I feel like you can be a band that writes sophisticated music and still approaches their live show with a sense of abandon." |
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