Now We Can See, The Thermals’ long-anticipated follow-up to their 2006 album, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, delivers contemplative and often somber lyrics packaged sweetly in methodically structured pop-punk sing-a-longs. It again features their signature attitude of general discontent, but an increased sense of maturity has made songwriter Hutch Harris’s lyrics more complex.
The title track is a stinging critique of America’s current political climate, with lines like, “Our enemies lay dead on the ground / and still we kick.” However, the song’s three-chord simplicity lightens the emotional load significantly. “At The Bottom of the Sea” is a pearly encapsulation of the album’s strong language and instrumentation, but unfortunately, the end of this track should have been the end of the record — it’s only a matter of time before the listener bores of 11 consecutive tracks with strikingly similar anatomies.
