Thursday’s Tom Keeley (left) and
Steve Pedulla onstage with their guitars
of choice—Fender American
Standard
Telecasters with Seymour Duncan
Hot Rails bridge pickups.
Photo by Dave Summers
Since emerging from the late-’90s
hardcore underground and achieving
wide acclaim, Thursday has been
credited with helping pave the way for
modern-rock heavyweights like My
Chemical Romance, exposing the world
to great new hardcore bands via the opening
slots on their tours, and maintaining
street cred by recording with up-and-coming
bands like Japan’s Envy. More
than anything though, Thursday will be
remembered for defining the emo/post-hardcore
blueprint via Steve Pedulla and
Tom Keeley’s scintillating dual-guitar
attack, Geoff Rickly’s passionate singing
and open-hearted lyrics, and the utterly
dominating rhythm section of bassist Tim
Payne and drummer Tucker Rule.
Indulging in extreme dynamics while
melody battles discordance is Pedulla and
Keeley’s
raison d’être. This juxtaposition was
first explored on the band’s second album,
Full Collapse—which they have been recently
performing in its entirety to celebrate its
10-year anniversary. Thursday’s major-label
debut,
War All the Time expanded on the
sound with a keener sense of eloquence as
pianos and choirs found their way into the
oft-ferocious mix. The band’s 2009 release,
Common Existence, showed a conscious shift
away from the post-hardcore constraints
they helped establish, and now their sixth
album,
No Devolución, finds them exploring
deep valleys and high peaks—be they emotional
or melodic, expressed in subtler or
more intriguing ways.
“There are traditional chord structures in
things we do,” explains Keeley, “but there
was sort of an effort to circumvent the guitar
or approach guitar parts other than thinking
of them as guitar parts—kind of undoing
the guitar as a traditional rock instrument
and using these different effects, chord structures,
and strumming patterns to make a
more nebulous, melodic vehicle.”
As Pedulla puts it, “A big part of what
makes us Thursday is that there are sometimes
parts that are almost two leads going
on, and they interlock in some strange or
unconventional way—so there’s definitely a
different dynamic to how we write. It’s the
type of thing where both of us will be vamping
on a part to try and find what we’re going
to play, and we sort of have this unspoken
rule where we say, ‘Right . . . bear with me.
I’m going to fall on my face a lot—but I
will find something.’ We have that trust. We
know we’re not being judged by each other.”
Keeley agrees. “It’s a million different
things—it’s never the same equation
twice. Sometimes we just ignore each
other and play as many notes as possible.
Sometimes we dictate to each other.
I think it’s safe to say there’s a mutual
respect for our different points of view
and different practices of guitar playing.
I couldn’t imagine these songs without
Steve’s unique voice. It’s a weird alchemy,
a weird experiment. There are a lot of
mistakes, a lot of revisions, and tons and
tons of editing, historically anyway. And,
eventually, even if our parts are fighting
each other, we know when it’s working
and we know when it’s not.”
Pedulla reaches to the nether regions of his Tele’s fretboard. Photo by Elise Shively
As far as “nebulous melodic vehicles” are
concerned, it’d be hard to argue that Keeley
and Pedulla have been anything but successful
on that front with
No Devolución. Written in
the wake of Rickly’s divorce, it has an emotional
rawness set to churning fury, chiming
elegance, and wreaths of eclectic treatments.
“But the whole record isn’t that,” Keeley is
quick to add. “It’s not like our guitars sound
like ghosts or anything! We certainly have a
lot of power chords and traditional angular
guitar work—which is sort of our thing. In
that sense, it was business as usual. But with
[producer] Dave Fridmann, there’s a lot of
attention to pushing things toward the weird.”
Fridmann has produced Thursday’s last
three records, but reportedly it was the latest
one—which was barely demoed at all and
was written in just a week—that particularly
fired his imagination. What is it about
Fridmann that keeps the band coming back
to him for production duties?
“You rely on Dave to tell you when to cut
the shit, quit thinking, and just play,” says
Keeley. “But if I say to him ‘Hey, man, I don’t
know if this part is right for this record—how
does this sound?’ he’ll reply ‘It sounds like a
guitar.’ That means it’s my responsibility to dial
in exactly what I need. In the past, I’ve gone,
‘I’ve got no idea what guitar tone I want—
what do you think would be a good idea?’ to
other producers, and they’ll come up with all
these suggestions. Dave does do this on occasion—
he’ll fine-tune things—but generally it’s
‘What do you want it to sound like? What’s
your vision?’ That’s scary, but ultimately it
forces us to become better musicians with better
ears. He generally trusts our gut and our
instincts, as far as getting into the weird spots.
It’s terrifying—but completely empowering.”
For a band of self-described non-musicians,
Thursday encompasses a scope and spectrum
of aural possibility that’s perhaps wider than
musicians who play “by the rules.” Thursday’s
distinct sound has always revolved around
Pedulla’s and Keeley’s clashing tones. Clean
melodies run parallel to each other before
soaring through molten distortion, generally
grappling with each other and causing
semitone clashes, off-kilter countermelodies,
and ending in all sorts of pleasing chaos. You
expect dropped-D tunings, escalating octave
melodies, furious tremolo picking alongside
thrashed minor 7th chords, and, more often
than not, the delight of crashing from clean,
intricate chords to full-tilt, metal-tinged riffs.
Light chorus and a splash of delay keep the
flashier melodies sounding like they’ll float
into forever, but it’s the stop-start breakdowns
punctuated by complete silence that define
Thursday’s guitar MO.