THANK YOU SCIENTIST
New Jersey proggers explore new worlds.
Thank You Scientist’s fourth album Terraformer is reportedly so named because the process of rendering an environment inhabitable felt like an appropriate metaphor for their recent evolution from infighting gaggle to harmonious collective. However, the concept of terraforming could equally apply to their approach to music-making. Baffling in its complexity and imagination, Terraformer is an album that builds a world of vast proportion and astonishing detail at breakneck pace.
The molten core of this rapidly evolving prog planet is King Crimson’s zig-zagged rhythms and Zappa’s madcap melodic ear, all forced through the modern prog prism, but in Thank You Scientist’s world, there is room for everything. Nothing feels off-limits, whether it’s the fractured drum’n’bass cut-up of Birdwatching, the thunderous rock formation that is the title track, or the smooth, Gershwin-esque jazz of Shatner’s
Lament, which offers some limited respite from the constructivist chaos around it.
Terraformer marks the recording debut of three members – namely, Joe Fadem (drums), Sam Greenfield (sax) and Joe Gullace (trumpet) – all of whom have played a significant role in achieving the aforementioned harmony in the band’s personal and musical interactions. We like to picture the new line-up gathering in some sort of ritualistic desert ceremony, but frankly, whether it was peyote or a team-building day at Butlin’s, whatever they’ve done is working. This feels like the prog metal equivalent of a Bruegel painting – the kind of thing that requires not just painstaking attention to detail, but also a veritable workshop of talented individuals working with shared vision.
Opener Wrinkle sees the instrumentalists, led by guitarist Tom Monda, drop in and out with such shockingly fast, in-the-pocket interplay that it’s almost a surprise to hear Salvatore Marrano’s belting Claudio Sanchez-esque vocal intervene on the next track, FXMLDR (that’s ‘Fox Mulder’ without the vowels, X Files fans). The latter is a good example of their ‘everything, now’ attitude in action: skipping between brass-enthused jazz funk to teasing an enormous straightforward pop punk chorus, then into a bridge section of delayed strings, which is soon displaced by Monda’s asteroid belt arpeggio. And that’s just the first half.
It will be too much for many: too tech metal for old-school prog heads, too bright and in-jokey for Wilson worshippers and too full for Floyd fans. But Thank You Scientist are here to experiment – and then some. To build not a record, but a world, and then sail clean off the edge of it.
THE PROG METAL EQUIVALENT OF A BRUEGEL PAINTING…