Thou
Prolific doom crew is a completist’s dream/nightmare
In late October, a few days before Halloween, the progressive doom band Thou played a show in their hometown of Baton Rouge, LA. Those looking for news of the five-band bill might’ve Googled Thou’s primitive-yet-informative website, which, on the day of the gig, also listed 14 “Upcoming” releases. The quintet is no doubt prolific. And yet the preponderance of splits, EPs and compilations on the band’s horizon suggests that Thou are in no hurry to finish their third full-length, which, according to vocalist Bryan Funck, is going to be called Summit.
“In my opinion, a full-length should be a very cohesive, thought-out record that logically expands upon the sound of the preceding record,” says guitarist Andy Gibbs, “whereas an EP or a split is a chance to be more experimental and do things we wouldn’t normally do.” Given that Thou’s sound already stretches the limits of orthodox doom, it’s hard to tell where the band’s core tendencies end and the experimentation begins.
Perhaps it’s best to take it from the top. Thou’s debut full-length, 2007’s Tyrant, an album
distinguished by blasted-out vocals and majestic melodies, brings to mind a comment that Gibbs made when asked about influences. On the subject of hardcore punk, the six-stringer referred to Converge’s Jane Doe—perhaps the ultimate example of metallic hardcore—as “one of my favorite ‘unintentional doom’ records.”
Thou, of course, favor plenty of intentional doom—Black Sabbath, Pentagram and Saint Vitus—but there’s little precedent for the kind of melancholic motifs that Gibbs and guitarist Matthew Thudium pull out of the murk. “Whatever I do is a result of what Matthew is doing on his guitar,” Gibbs says. “If left to my own devices, I would probably add way too many spaced-out, delay-drenched lead parts to our songs. Matthew has a good way of reining me in, and we kind of bounce off each other in order to get the right melody-to-sludge ratio.”
Helping push Thou away from melody, or any niceties whatsoever, is Funck’s job, a role he lobbied for after seeing the band play several local shows. “I loved the music, but the Acid Bath-style vocals weren’t my thing, so I started harassing Andy about letting me sing for the band,” says Funck. “At some point when they were recording Tyrant, the vocal tracks got erased, so they decided to finally try me out for a practice or two.”
The rest, at they say, is history. Funck, whose vocals on the recent Thou/Leech split EP scream “church arsonist,” has taken the band in an uncommon direction. Perhaps someday soon, he and his bandmates will record a full-length that reflects what the singer calls the “weird, raw, black metal stuff creeping into our sound.” And if that record is as good as Thou’s side of the Leech split, it’s sure to be one of the finest examples of doom in recent memory.
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