Album Review: Thunderbird Divine, Little Wars
Posted in Reviews on September 5th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
A 42-minute masterclass in the righteousness of doing your own thing, Thunderbird Divine‘s Little Wars arrives as a five-years-later sequel to the Philly soul-sludge-rocking four-piece’s 2019 debut, Magnasonic — they’ve had singles and an EP out between — with nine tracks varied in intent and course united by the sense of scope overarching the entire affair. And like any good literature, Little Wars teaches you how to read it. The opening intro “Pony Express,” with far-off Western harmonica complemented by keys, leads into a Morricone build of snare roll and steady train-engine rhythm, and when the backing vocals start, you know they’re all-in.
The piece continues to swell, but for a record that hasn’t been on two minutes and which one might take on thinking ‘this is going to be rock and roll,’ they’ve begun decidedly outside the normal sphere of what that means, and the many subsequent divergences that take place all stem from that first one as they move toward “Times Gone Bad” and “Last Laugh,” a pairing that seems purposeful in pairing life’s ups and downs and highlighting the persistence to get through both. That “Black Rhino Mantra” follows immediately also feels like no coincidence.
But “Pony Express” tells you a lot of what you need to know about just how open the setting is, with a short burst of feedback and manipulated noise before they cut to the organ that starts out “Times Gone Bad.” Thunderbird Divine‘s Erik Caplan seems to be driving a lot of the arrangement choices — he adds not only theremin, guitar and vocals as usual throughout, but also sitar, the banjo on “Old Black Crow,” the aforementioned harmonica, various synths and drones and, I’m just copying the album credits here, “weird stuff,” which when you listen to the record, is a fair assessment of what you’re getting at times — but he’s hardly alone in his cause.
The band’s lineup has changed since 2019, with Michael Stuart returning on drums and the near-minstrel throaty vocals of “Old Black Crow” as well as new bassist Joshua Adam Solomon (also guitar, vocals, synth and percussion) and keyboardist Jack Falkenbach (also vocals, violin, melodica) making their presence felt in the material. If “Pony Express” subtly does the job of introducing some of the “weird stuff” so that listeners aren’t caught off-guard as Little Wars progresses, then “Times Gone Bad” works to establish the songwriting context that will serve as the backdrop and complementarity-object of all that revelry.
Above all else, Thunderbird Divine sound free. They’re plenty heavy in the tumult of “Times Gone Bad,” and I won’t take away from the ’60s-psych-informed organ and general Monster Magnetry of “Black Rhino Mantra” or the rhythmic urgency brought beneath the laid-over Hammond in “Highway Dawn,” with more backing vocals and a bluesy vocal from Caplan with a hook about driving into the sky. But more than ‘heavy’ as a central ideological goal toward its own ends, Thunderbird Divine craft their own definition of what heaviness is and does in music, and that’s as likely to be the later-Iommi riff that anchors “These Eyes” as the backing vocals and keys that build the song around it. The songs are thought through and fluidly arranged in the tracklisting — which is to say “Times Gone Bad” into “Last Laugh” makes sense musically as well as conceptually — but a strong sense of fuck-around-and-find-out in terms of studio experimentation remains.
They’re not the first in heavy rock to bring a theremin like that topping the start of “Tides” or the flutey sounds that follow, or to switch up between sundry synthesizer and keyboard sounds, but they do it especially well across the span Little Wars, and it’s a major factor in what makes the record feel like such a journey and such a victory for the band. More over, they’re not just throwing in that theremin (a longstanding feature in Caplan‘s arrangements going back to his days fronting the more outwardly-sludged Wizard Eye) for the hell of it. Whatever the “weird stuff” in question, it’s in the finished product of the recording because it serves the interest, impact and/or atmosphere of the song, and that’s true from “Pony Express” through “Old Black Crow” and into the creepy post-script vibe of the subsequent outro “Carousel,” which is less directly Morricone than the lead-in, meditating through a waltz with effects before, at about 1:47, stopping and resuming with the sounds more Tim Burton than Sergio Leone.
Because it’s been five years, this second full-length from Thunderbird Divine feels something like a culmination. “These Eyes” has a doomly majesty to its procession, and that’s probably part of it, but the band are no less at home in the funkified swing and stomp of “Last Laugh” or the psychedelic lean of “Black Rhino Mantra,” and somehow even “Times Gone Bad” feels celebratory on some level. But the freedom? That’s everywhere and in everything, and while there are structures in the songs and patterns of verses and choruses are followed where applicable, between the shifts in approach from one piece to the next and the goes-where-it-needs-to-regardless-of-genre sensibility overlaid across the tracklisting when taken front-t0-back, Thunderbird Divine have struck a rare balance between pursuing their own creative whims and creating a record that’s accessible for a genre audience.
It’s not that they’re unhinged. Hearing Little Wars, it’s just the opposite. Each cut sounds like it’s been hammered out and purposefully made into what it is. When and how that happened, whether it was through pandemic years or in the studio while they were waiting for somebody to come back from the bathroom, is secondary to the ultimate vibe the album casts, which is rich and encompassing without either getting lost in pretense or giving up a sense of ‘classic’ influence, however one might want to define that. Maybe they just have more to offer than the standard heavy band. They sure sound like it here. Little Wars is a record that justifies anticipation easily, and its meld of scope and space, grounded pieces allowed to soar — looking at you, second-half guitar solo and backing vocals in “Last Laugh” — isn’t going to speak to everyone, but will resonate that much deeper for the right kind of head for that. For whatever it’s worth, I’ll count myself in that number.
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