Thou have always reveled in misanthropy. Onstage, the band might antagonize a disengaged audience by taunting them, or turning around and ignoring them. In lyric sheets, they paint humankind as a failed endeavor, once full of potential for good but chronically unable to pry itself from pitfalls as old as civilization itself. This outright disdain is one of the few things that Thou will cop to sharing with the Louisiana sludge-metal forebears, like Eyehategod and Crowbar, to whom they’re frequently compared.
Despite obvious similarities in geography, aggression, the lacerating use of guitar feedback, and a stylistic blend of doom metal’s murk and hardcore’s nastiness, Thou have never accepted the sludge mantle. Vocalist Bryan Funck has repeatedly suggested a closer kinship to another decades-old regional scene: Seattle grunge. Thou have amassed a staggering repertoire of grunge covers over the years, and it’s clear that their affinity goes beyond a cheeky fondness for Nirvana. Nevertheless, the band’s own abrasive, atypical, and often meandering compositions can make Funck’s determination to keep sludge at arm’s length seem a little precious. Not even the Melvins at their heaviest have ever sounded a fraction as ugly.
But on Umbilical, Thou make their grunge lineage more explicit while maintaining the intensity of their all-encompassing contempt. “Essentially, it’s a diss record,” Funck said of the album in a recent interview. “But I’m dissing Thou.” He turns the magnifying glass on himself, interrogating the anarcho-DIY ethos he’s held since adolescence against the backdrop of the compromises that Thou have made to further their careers. “Everything you’ve ever done, everything you’ve ever said, everything you’ve ever felt is a dagger on my belt,” he shrieks on “Emotional Terrorist,” before flipping his perspective: “Everything I’ve ever done, everything I’ve ever said, everything I’ve ever felt is a chain around my neck.”
It might seem like this insistent self-loathing calls for Thou’s most gnarled music yet, but instead we get the band at its most streamlined. This is their first album (excepting collaborations) with no tracks over seven minutes, and none of the brief interludes that the band is fond of. Everything is a song, and most of these songs even abide by something close to standard pop structure. Umbilical is no less heavy than any other Thou album—it might be their heaviest yet—but it no longer requires mental gymnastics to call this music grunge. Maybe it’s Alice in Chains starring in The Crow: murdered by a gang and resurrected in ghastlier form to seek vengeance. Maybe it’s Nirvana after Cobain makes a deal with the Devil, surviving the ’90s but cursed to make progressively more fucked-up albums (Umbilical is perhaps two or three iterations past In Utero).
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