Indie band wallows in its insignificance

By Kylie Wakefield
Collegian Reporter
September 27, 2006

With a band name like Thunderbirds Are Now!, you automatically set some pretty high standards for yourself. The name is random, mysterious and slightly ambiguous. The punctuation mark even implies that the band’s music will be exciting.

But exciting is exactly what the group’s new album, Make History, isn’t. The band made a bad move by calling their third musical effort Make History when they’ve hardly made a mark on listeners. This album certainly doesn’t seem like it will put Thunderbirds Are Now! on the map anytime soon.

Thunderbirds Are Now! hail from Detroit, where indie garage rock reigns over the music scene. Singer Ryan Allen and his fellow bandmates, Scott Allen, Mike Durgan and Howard Chang, take indie rock, mix it with some punk, slip in a dash of new wave and add in some synth to make their music sound as original as possible. The band’s first full-length album, Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, achieved this to the fullest extent. It was innovative, always exciting and kept you on your feet. DLIC never ceased to be full of energy.

Somewhere along the line, though, TAN! seemed to have lost their roots. They traded in using more keyboard and crazy synth sounds to focus mainly on the guitars and vocals. Instead of sounding even slightly unique on their third album, they now sound like they’re trying a little too hard to accomplish their goal of standing out. Now, don’t get me wrong. Make History is still worth a few listens if you’re a die-hard TAN! fan.

Make History begins with an acoustic guitar and Queen-esque vocals, slowly building up to a pounding drum and some of those good ol’ keyboard noises. But the song, titled “Panthers In Crime,” quickly becomes mediocre and not as exciting as the buildup.

Track five, “Why We War,” is perhaps the best on the album. Along with the guitar, bass and drums, it combines samples, maracas and keyboard to give it the most colorful sounding song on the 11 track CD. Allen sings, “Fists come out like a bar-room brawl/Scratched-out eyes like a bathroom stall/Stand outside where the corpses crawl/We don’t know what we want/But we want it all.”

The lyrics on Make History don’t make much sense, and neither do the song titles, but it’s really just the TAN! shtick. “Sleeping in the Lion’s Mouth,” which is track seven, is perhaps another perfect example. It starts out as a song about, well, sleeping in a lion’s mouth and finding comfort in nature by building “a home out of leaves and bark.” It really seems like the song is going in a positive direction.

But then the chorus chimes in: “The things that people say/The way that people talk/Make me wanna take the words/Right out of their mouth.” Perhaps the song was written in a bipolar state of mind. Either way, the music isn’t good enough to make you forget how uninteresting the lyrics really are.

Throughout most of the album, Allen spends too much time trying to ignite sing-alongs from the listeners rather than actually making an effort to sing. Durgan does a fine job on the drums, leading the fast-paced songs, and the few samples used tend to be interesting. But, alas, that is where the error lies.

Thunderbirds Are Now! simply needs to return to their synth roots and forget about trying to be rock ‘n roll. They were going in the right direction and just got lost along the way. But, I have faith in you, boys. Now go to your keyboard, play the hell out of it, and turn down the vocals. If you do so, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll finally be able to make history.

wakefieldk1@lasalle.edu