Album Review: Thrice - 'Horizons/East'
“My first and foremost memory/ is staring up in wonder at the wall / It circumscribed the city/ they said beyond it nothing dwelt at all”, frontman Dustin Kensrue sighs over opener Color of the Sky. “But I came to wonder if the stories all were true”.
And so begins the Californian quartet’s eleventh (!) studio album, an Odyssean feat that questions what we know. Part-concept-album, part-introspective imagining, Horizons/East ponders the age-old ideas of a flawed belief system and the safety and danger that comes with an un-inquisitive mind living in an echo chamber. In a society ravaged by tribalism and savagery — a description which suits both the society Thrice creates and the society we all reside in — asking what it means to know is as essential as ever. And, in the case of Thrice, what we know is as tumultuous as ever.
With each song giving a snapshot into their society, each song takes on a very specific sound. The afore-mentioned opener is gentle; a contemplative track with muted instrumentals that slowly builds as the protagonist ‘begins to believe’, (to steal a line from The Matrix, a not incongruous comparison). It swells as the lyrics grow more determined, almost seeming to fill with colour and life as they begin to question. First single Scavengers, meanwhile, acts as an exposure to the disorder of the outside world: dark, gritty. “Overhead, are those angels or vultures?” Kensrue asks, with “heavy wings and the hum of decay”. The promise offered by the chorus, then — “I will find you in the black light/ of that cold, dry land” — gives the idea of rescue, or at least of being reassured.
And so on it goes, each song acting as a piece of the narrative that the four create. But each song is greater than the sum of their whole. The piano-led Northern Lights, a beautifully written piece that offers the perfect balance of confusion and hope, manages to embody Plato’s analogy of the cave in its recognition of ‘another sun’ ‘behind the curtain’ while offering ‘a better way to build a world’. It does so while being part of a story of escape and redemption. It comes slap-bang in the middle of the punk-oriented Buried in the Sun and the incredibly vivid Summer Set Fire to the Rain. Elsewhere, the hazy Dandelion Wine immerses you an oasis of pseudo-shoegaze brilliance before dunking you in the chaotic Unitive/East, where not-quite-legible vocals ooze over a cacophony of a piano piece in disarray.
The whole album is as diverse as the band’s discography as a whole, melding experimentation with their post-hardcore roots, and each track is unique. In an album exploring the idea of the interrelatedness of a society divided, the band are able to perfectly embody their own message.
Through the ten short songs of Horizon/East, Kensrue and co address the temporality and fragility of civilisation to create a spiritually and epistemologically profound piece of work that shows a band still evolving, still pushing boundaries and still destroying what we thought we knew about them over twenty years after their first release. A brilliant piece of work.
Words by James O’Sullivan