Fred Thomas
Changer
Reviewed by: Max Miller
Like many artists, Fred Thomas’s career has been one of synthesis. With his seminal group Saturday Looks Good To Me, he synthesized the summery feel of ‘60s pop with the wallflower charm of groups like Beat Happening. His solo career has found him dabbling in just about every form of indie rock imaginable, including fervent Neil Young worship on 2012’s Kuma. He even recently put out an album of ambient music — 2016’s Minim.
But it was on 2015’s All Are Saved that Thomas changed the game. The usual influences are all still in place, but his essential, unique essence finally solidified into a rambling, train-of-thought take on lo-fi rock which tackles love, aging and sorrow with pure poetry. On Changer, Thomas perfects the template he laid out on his previous album, navigating the strange world of growing up within an artistic community that still often takes the “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” slogan to heart.
While manic, driving singles like “Misremembered,” “Voiceover” and “Brickwall” serve as tent poles, the narrative at the center of Changer comes on “Open Letter To Forever,” when Thomas describes being harassed by a bunch of punks at a show for dressing like a hipster. Thomas remarks, “Man, I’m probably a couple years younger than your father. I’ve traded in any chance at stability for this community of people who, like, know what Black Flag is, or whatever,” before describing how he became entranced by the intricacies of the punks’ outfits. That sense of displacement, which Thomas combats by looking past the surface bullshit to notice the beauty of life, is core to Changer’s overall tone. The “immaculate core contained in the center of all these regular feelings,” even, to quote “Voiceover.” While he is out making sacrifices for his art, his friends with normal lives treat him like “a postcard that they can hang,” as he puts it on “Brickwall.”
Thomas isn’t above the charms of nostalgia either, as he puts on his best Elvis croon to cry like a hound dog over a miserable living situation on “2008.” “And you were sad before you got here, and you’ll be sad when you move on,” he sings, adding, “and you’ll be sad that they don’t miss you when you’re gone.” He’s laughing at what a sad sack he was being, as he paints an image of a God who won’t even take pity on his moping.
The electronic influences Thomas flaunted on All Are Saved and explored in great detail on Minim are even more present here. Washes of synthesizer coat even his most bare-bones compositions, and several interstitial instrumentals like “There Is No Need To Participate,” “Infuriated” and “Oval Beach” pepper the album’s track listing.
Fred Thomas’s music beats like one giant heart, bursting with passion. His voice is that of every emo kid who has grown up to find their seething emotions replaced with a sort of bemused detachment as they recognize the same patterns in human nature again and again. Sure, there are still allotments made for joy and rage, but overall, Thomas exhibits a more mature sense of self-awareness that allows him to laugh at himself, past and present, along with everyone else. The joke being, of course, that being alive is fucking surreal.
Rating: Bad-Ass
