Search - Thought Industry :: Black Umbrella

DEEP PERSONAL ROOM

nfmsound.au@siol.net | Slovenia | 06/05/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Deeper then ever still complicated,melodical depressive combinations are wonderfull and production is very "ROOM"orientated and that's what I like... keep runing my brains with THOUGHTS."

Thought Industry - 'Black Umbrella' (Metal Blade)

Mike Reed | USA | 06/02/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Looks to be Thought Industry's fourth CD.Might be tough to categorize their sound.Try diverse metal.Might take like two or three listens for this disc to grow on you,but I thought it was extremely cool.Tracks like "Bitter","Edward Smith","Her Rusty Nail" and "Earwig" lets you know exactly what this five piece is all about.Might appeal to fans of Queens Of The Stone Age,Dream Theater,Fu Manchu and maybe even Faith No More.A decent find.Give it a chance."

Abstractly tuneful grunge/thrash from a bad mood

Brian Block | Greensboro, North Carolina | 03/16/1999

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This album serves the interesting retroactive function of proving that Thought Industry's MODS and OUTER SPACE were basically happy-mood albums. For all their screaming, and their songs about drunkenness and the religious right and the interesting sensations of death and the advisability of faking death, those albums came with a spirit of deliberate difficulty and obtuseness that was life-affiriming. No one would write songs that change time signatures, dynamic levels, melodies, and instrumentation every 5-20 seconds if they didn't have the spirit to _want_ to. No one in a truly bad mood would stage silly 2-minute rock operas. It takes a certain joie de vivre to even bother naming your songs "Pinto Award In Literature" or "Love Is America Spelled Backwards", let alone to make them faux-suites in order to add subtitles like "Burning Kalamazoo To The Ground With Zippo Fluid" and "Your Grandma's A Seal Killer". Or maybe this is just my perspective as a loyal cultivator of e-mail friendships, wherein my friends learn to just expect that my chattier messages will come with subject headings like "Live, from the Orange Blob Anti-Defamation League" or "Volcanic Molehills #12 & #35". And if I suddenly settle for a subject heading like "hey", they know instantly to worry. BLACK UMBRELLA is a simple enough title, and the music inside can be usefully compared to well-known bands (as I'll demonstrate), and the lyrics are bleak and straightforward. And if I feel such spiritual kin to songwriter Brent Oberlin this far, maybe I should pause fearfully to wonder if I'm going to start getting in touch with _my_ inner Mark David Chapman, too.Brent, I am deducing, was having unpleasant girlfriend experiences during the writing of BLACK UMBRELLA, my specific evidence being that almost all of the 13 songs relate to this (with "My Famous Mistake", about getting kicked out of the pubs for being too drunk and sleeping next to a nativity scene, with a chorus of "Oooh ah oooh ah, what's left to lose?", not breaking the spell either). Other songwriters, of course, have had girl problems. Brent's "Earwig", however, is fairly distinctive, in that it plays something a version of Radiohead's "Creep" in which Johnny Greenwood's violent bass interjection is repeated over and over till it takes over half the song, in which the calm acoustic parts are played brittle and jittery, and in which the fact that the singer is a creep and a weirdo is left to _us_ to deduce, using the repetitions of "Tell your Mom 'Hi' cuz I am home again to break what's left like I just don't care" as evidence. "Edward Smith" has the chunky beat of Everclear's "Father Of Mine", but the half-dozen extra chords are a less notable difference than between an Everclear song with the implied metamessage "you jerked me over, and I'm confused and hurt, so I'll embarrass you nationwide", and a Thought Industry song with the implied metamessage "you jerked me over, and I'm confused and hurt, and maybe if you're lucky I won't peel your skin off layer by layer". "Her Rusty Nail", a riff-rocker in 3/4 except the rightly obtrusive 3-beat-5-beat alternation of the chorus, salutes his girlfriend "Heil!". "World" would be a midpoint between the calm baroqueness of XTC and feedback walls of My Bloody Valentine were it not for the loudly sung chorus "I hope you drink yourself in line. Love is vile and devours". "December 10th", like the new accessible hit-single-band Metallica but with piano etude instead of classical guitar, attempts some salvage but without letting go: "Tell me yours and I'll remember mine, a crushing hug for ruined girls with mushroom clouds in mind". And the just-above-a-whisper "24 Hours Ago I Could Breathe", self-explanatory, isn't threatening but does seem to imply that the racks of pop-psych advisory books on coping have not come into existence to serve his personal benefit."Tragic Juliet"--- which, except for the heavy cymbals + kickdrums and the easily understood singing, is almost ready for R.E.M.'s CHRONIC TOWN--- is a love song, but one for a phone and mail relationship with someone he's never met, and it could desperately use an infusion of TMBG's "Ana Ng" playfulness. Thought Industry fill UMBRELLA with sharp metallic riffs, a still slightly-twisted sense of song structure, an outstanding creativity with dynamics and with keyboard supplements, Brent's expressive voice (he can even sing!), a good drummer, and enough residual weirdness to howl "Without you, I can't hug the stars, tilt my head back, and drive Cole's combine towards Pluto". To me, it adds up to a genuinely excellent album. But I hear the words, I see the proudly-bored or shamefully head-covered band photos, and I strongly wonder if suffering-for-art is overrated."