Thank, or The Rock Band Thank from Leeds should one be of a more formal disposition, have long been somewhat of a unique proposition. Sometimes too noisy and abrasive for those who intrigued by their post-punk associations, yet often too danceable for those wishing for musical extremities, the Leeds bunch have long inhabited a small niche of their own creation. A disastrous place to be for some – especially in an age where lasting impressions are cemented from quick glimpses of art spoon fed by algorithms – but for Thank, it’s here that’s probably the best place to be. I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed proves this wonderfully.
The new record from the rock band, I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed is pretty much a collection of contrasts that compliment and alienate. Humorous yet misanthropic, grating but grooving and agitated but cooly composed, the record takes the post-punk tag and realises it literally, ignoring all pre-existing conventions. It’s a bending, shifting and wonderfully chaotic record in thanks to it’s refusal to comply with standard norms, and as a result, it’s an album that’s just effortlessly intriguing. Thank don’t fit in, but why should they. I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed isn’t a record that fits, and that’s the point.
With I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed out now via Big Scary Monsters, we got in touch with vocalist Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe to break down the record, track by track.
Related: Thank – I Have A Physical Body That Can Be Harmed | Album Review
Control
A lot of our songs are the result of combining a bunch of older abandoned ideas. You can try a million different arrangements or structures for a song, sometimes over a period of years, and it never quite clicks, then you decide to smash a couple of them together and suddenly it all comes together in like half an hour. This was one of those songs; the vocals in the first half are almost directly lifted from a song we scrapped from the last album called ‘Micro/Macro’, and the riff at the very end was originally a Blood Incantation-style death metal pastiche I was divinely inspired to write when I started playing a pointy guitar again for the first time in about a decade. That riff got turned into a failed attempt at a d-beat song, and then a failed attempt at a Lumpy Records-style hardcore tune which the other guys all refused to play because it sounded like circus music, and then eventually… this. Have you seen TV On The Radio playing ‘Wolf Like Me’ on Letterman?
Woke Frasier
I imagine probably the worst part of being in a band with me is that if you reject one of my terrible ideas I will simply take it to another project. I recently started playing bass in a band called Solderer, but before we had a name I was quite adamant that we should be called either Woke Simpsons or Woke Frasier, and my bandmates quite strongly disagreed. Solderer’s loss is Thank’s gain, I suppose! Musically this one is primarily a Lewis (Millward, guitar and synth) composition, I think he has set himself the goal of making us sound gradually, subtly like a guitar version of British Murder Boys, almost undetectable until five years from now when I wake up one morning and all our instruments have been replaced by analog hardware. He thinks he’s slick, he thinks I don’t know, but I know. Lyrically it’s sort of a PSA spoken in scare-quotes from the perspective of a right wing podcast grifter.
Do It Badly
My girlfriend Sarah and I have both adopted the catchphrase “do it badly” as a way of powering through imposter syndrome and decision paralysis and whatever else is stopping you from doing what you want to do. In other words, if something is worth doing then it’s better to do it badly than not do it at all. This song was written as a reminder of that simple fact, but unfortunately I am incapable of writing a song about one single topic, so it’s also about which cast members from beloved TV sitcoms may or may not be CIA assets, and it’s also about the joy of malicious compliance, including the funniest possible combination of pint and pint glass you could serve to an arsehole customer in a pub just to piss them off – a pint of Guinness in a Madri glass.
The Spores
This song was the result of me writing a riff that sounded like something from the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist, and then the group of us spending a few weeks trying to make it sound as little like Frankenchrist as possible. It’s about when a former landlord of mine put off investigating a bathroom leak for long enough that it resulted in mushrooms growing on the kitchen ceiling. This one has been a live staple for so long that Lewis keeps forgetting it’s on the new album, but I can assure you that it is indeed on the new album.
Down With The Sickness
This song was the result of me writing a synth loop that sounded like something from Mortiis’ The Smell of Rain, and actually genuinely trying to make the song sound as much like The Smell of Rain as possible. I don’t think we were successful in doing that, but I do thik it’s a good song. Then again, when we played it in Paris last year there were some goths pretty much shagging each other down the front, so perhaps we were successful. Not my cheeriest set of lyrics, this one is kind of talking about how no matter what utopian ideas we try to bring to fruition, someone – either intentionally or not – will find a way of using it to make others suffer. It might be named after a Disturbed song but the very obvious Big Black reference is much cooler.
Barely
Just before we released Thoughtless Cruelty I got really obsessed with Tears For Fears and convinced myself that for Thank album two we should try to sound exactly like Tears For Fears. I guess this is the main relic from that period of time. When we recorded Thoughtless Cruelty Cameron (Moitt, bass) brought his six-string bass into the studio, and we kept trying and failing to find a suitable part for it, so it never got used. Then when we wrote this song I specifically came up with a perfect six-string bass part, but it turned out he’d sold the bass. Extremely inconsiderate if you ask me!
Smiling Politely
You’d be surprised how long it took me to realise just how many Simpsons references there are on this album. This is another song we made by smashing together bits of old unused demos; I swear some incarnation of these lyrics have been used in multiple songs across like four different projects of mine, but most recently they were part of another unused song written for our first album called ‘The Trooper’. We combined those lyrics with an old practice room jam based around a classic Steve Myles wonky drum groove. I got a little bit too excited about having access to an original Space Echo when we recorded this, so I insisted on using it for the Gibbytronix-style stuff on this tune, but I have to admit it didn’t really respond how I’d hoped, so most of those sounds are from a combination of a Boss DD3 and some of the daftest automation you’ll have ever seen on a Pro Tools AIR Mod Delay.
Dead Dog In A Ditch
We seem to have started a grand tradition of re-recording one old song for every album and making it faster (see: ‘Punching Bag’). One of the cool things about this album compared to Thoughtless Cruelty is that we’d been touring pretty relentlessly for two years prior to recording it. As much as I like our first album, we hadn’t been able to play a show in about 18 months prior to recording it, plus the full band was never in the same room at the same time during the writing and recording, and I think you can hear kind of a lack of energy as a result. This track is at the total opposite end of the spectrum, I feel like you can hear the energy from those two years of touring distilled into two minutes.
Perhaps Today
This song is about a religious organisation I stumbled across called Perhaps Today. As far as I can tell their core philosophy is basically that the rapture could come at any moment, so we should constantly be on guard and prepared. They have this mad series of videos called “pre-enactments” where they imagine what the rapture might look like on CCTV or on a dashcam or whatever, so for example there’s one on a school bus where all the kids get raptured and the bus driver doesn’t, although unfortunately it isn’t made clear why he didn’t get into Heaven. Musically when we wrote this we were kind of worried the middle section strays a little bit too close to Coldplay territory, but I guess that’s fitting seen as Coldplay basically sounds like a Hillsong worship band half the time.
Writing Out A List Of All The Names Of God
At various points ‘Perhaps Today’ and ‘Barely’ were each intended to be the album closer, but sometimes your hands are tied. As soon as we wrote this we knew it had to be the big finish. There’s a Blacklisters song called ‘Downbeat’ which I’m led to believe was originally called ‘Big Finish’, and would have been the opening track on that album. Unfortunately we aren’t as funny or clever as Blacklisters, but we are apparently both funny and clever enough to have had a diss track written about us by a band who I won’t name (that would be gauche). This is our response, bring on the war dubs.