The Thermals have been known to leave crowds in a heap of exhaustion with their self-described “gritty post-pop-punk” music. Yet amazingly, with The Thermals’ touring schedule, feverish musical stylings and extracurricular activities, lead singer and guitarist Hutch Harris and bassist Kathy Foster haven’t collapsed as well.
Their secret?
“We just had like five days off,” Harris said. “We were getting pretty tired at the end, but we had almost a week off.”
Performing with drummer Lorin Coleman, The Thermals are nearing the end of a cross-country trek, touring in support of their third full-length album, “The Body, The Mind, The Machine.” This tour will bring them to Los Angeles on Friday for a show at The Echo in Silver Lake.
While reviewing the band’s live show at the Bowery Ballroom, a journalist from The New York Times tellingly remarked that “it was sometimes hard to keep up with their relentless pace.”
Like their predecessors The Ramones, to whom they are commonly compared, The Thermals’ songs are fast and propulsive, rarely topping three minutes. Harris’ atonal voice, far from being an impediment, gives the band’s simplistic, pounding instrumentation both its frenetic energy and its paranoid sense of urgency.
“This is a lyrics-driven band, mostly about the vocals,” Harris said. “A lot of the music is just a vehicle for the vocals. Really, it’s trying to do a lot with a little. There’s just guitar, bass and a couple of drums.”
Much of the lyrical content of “The Mind, The Body, The Machine,” as with the band’s previous albums, concerns Harris’ anxiety regarding religion. Firmly embedded in organized religion in his youth, he recalls becoming disillusioned with it as he became older, particularly with what he saw as hypocrisy in both people in his own church and the Catholic church as a whole. Though Harris’ lyrics often focus on the darker side of biblical themes, his intent is neither to pontificate nor to persuade.
“A lot of people have written to me about our second record, and they said they’ve never thought about religion that way. But that can’t be the purpose of (music) because it’s something you can’t really count on,” Harris said. “I don’t take it that seriously, is the thing.”
Judging by The Thermals’ reception, he needn’t. The Thermals have garnered unexpected attention not only from newspaper giant The New York Times, but also from auto giant General Motors. After the release of The Thermal’s first album, General Motors offered them $50,000 to purchase the song “It’s Trivia” for a commercial promoting the Hummer sport utility vehicle. The band turned down the offer.
“It was never an option,” Harris said. “We talked about it for a couple of minutes. Everyone was totally aligned on that one.”
Instead, The Thermals contributed tracks to two compilations benefiting charities. First, the band covered Elliott Smith’s “Ballad of Big Nothing” for the compilation “To: Elliott From: Portland.” A portion of the proceeds fund the Elliott Smith Foundation’s charity, Free Arts for Abused Children.
The Thermals also covered Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine” for the compilation “Bridging the Distance: A Portland, OR Covers Compilation,” a project led by and benefiting the nonprofit mentorship organization p:ear.
“You do (compilations) to help people out and that’s for charity, so it’s a good thing,” Harris said.
Unwelcome financial offers and charitable work aside, there is one project The Thermals recently finished that elicits excitement ““ their contribution to ex-Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty’s “Burn to Shine” series, a sequence of city-by-city music documentaries that record performances by prominent local indie musicians in houses that are about to be demolished.
“That was great,” Harris said. “There were just so many good bands. Like all the best bands in Portland did that.”
Harris’ experience recording the song “Welcome to the Planet” for the Portland edition of “Burn to Shine” not only introduced him to Brendan Canty, who would go on to record “The Body” with the band, but it also put him in extended contact with several popular Portland-area bands, including The Shins and The Decemberists.
Still, Harris had one complaint.
“The house was only five years old. … People just build houses and tear them down five years later,” Harris said. “Other houses in the series have been kind of old and decrepit. … It was pretty cheesy.”
While the term “supergroup” usually refers to bands with upwards of eight members, The Thermals, with at least two members pursuing solo careers, may be supplying a secondary definition.
For just two people, The Thermals have certainly been generating a lot of noise.