New Thrushes album Exposing Seas out today

Thrushes

Last month, I wrote about the new single “Joan of Arc” by Baltimore shoegazers/noisemakers Thrushes. You can revisit that here. Today, they released a very well-made, but very strange video for that song. You can view the video here.

More important than that, the band’s third album Exposing Seas finally came out today. Thrushes has been one of my favorite new bands since I first found out about them in 2010. Their 2006 album Sun Come Undone and their 2010 sophomore release Night Falls were both in heavy rotation for a long time around here. They did a very nice and surprisingly restrained cover of the Mazzy Star song “Fade Into You” as a non-album b-side in 2010. You can read what I wrote about that here. After that flurry of activity, the band took a bit of a hiatus while its members focused on real life. By the time 2013 rolled around, I sort of thought that Thrushes was permanently done. Sure, they would play a Baltimore show once in a while, but it seemed like a logical conclusion to jump to. Sometime last year, they started to whisper about this new album, and I got very excited.

I’m trying to make my focus on new bands, or at least “new to me” bands. In any case, I don’t usually write about a band more than twice, and this makes four for Thrushes. I’ve also already done my “if you only listen to one song” bit today. There’s a lot of reasons why I shouldn’t write this, but I’ve been anticipating this so eagerly. And it’s so good. My eager anticipation has been rewarded greatly with the beautiful new album.

As much as I love the two previous records, this one has a different approach. They still make almost as much noise, but most of the new songs are slow burners with most of the heat on the back end. They gradually build to a roar. As much as I appreciate big bursts of sound and enormous sonic waves, I also love the landslide gathering momentum as it moves downhill.

“Salt & Stone” is a great example of that.

“Salt & Stone” by Thrushes

It’s a little noisy at the start. Without any dramatic gestures, it gets noisier and noisier until there’s almost a full-on buzz at the end.

This record is immediately going into heavy rotation, and I imagine it’ll end up in my year-end top ten. This year, I’m planning a top 50 list instead of my customary 40-ish. I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet all year, and I thought that would make it easier at year-end. I’m being very careful about the things I’m penciling in at the top of the heap, but the problem I’ve run into is the heaps of records that I’m penciling in at the 30-50 range. It’s been a great year for new releases, and some really fantastic records that I like a lot won’t even make my top 50. No worries about this one, though.

You can listen to the whole album via bandcamp and buy a digital download here. You can buy a limited edition pink vinyl copy of the album from New Grenada here, or on CD here.