Written by:
Dave Cantrell
Carving out their own distinct terrain that’s just a few furlongs north of Fugazi and, a bit further north still, the kinetic, somewhat ramshackle charm of the Chapel Hill scene that slayed the indie world in the early-to-mid 90s, each of which was in itself, to one degree or another, indebted to the post-punk tenets handed down by Wire and the like, the none-more-distinctly named Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death (that name derived from a phrase that commemorated 1816, the year in which regions of North America suffered dire crop shortages due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies and, yes, relative to the comparisons that we just opened this piece with, the name ‘Dutch East Indies’ has its own relevance but we digress), has arrived, full of charge and verve, with their – no surprise given its title – third full-length (self-released tomorrow, June 21st) and we’re stoked and honored to present its first ever airing and with a song-by-song breakdown vocalist/guitarist David Nutt, no less.
From the full-impact crunch and punch of opener “Carry Out” that’s nonetheless so bloody intricate as to earn the phrase ‘heavily delicate’ through “Bad Weeks” as it moves with hairline precision from the sparse and moody to the almost punishingly driven, the immediate FM hit (if you’re asking us) “Signal Burns” that takes no prisoners despite its ostensible accessibility, SEM favorite “Recoveries LTD” (passionate, intricate, visceral), the abundantly rambunctious hooks of “Another End” that come raining down like gifts from the proto-grunge gods in the sky (not entirely surprising given the band’s origin story – formed in the 90s, reformed in 2002 then again in 2015 which led to the album before us) to the damn near pensive final track “Minutewomen” that provides what we in the biz call a ‘proper ending’, Thirds, to those that have not heard this band until now (all of us here in the office raising our hands) is nothing short of a revelation of sorts. Prior to its inaugural spin you might’ve had a hard time convincing the staff here that they still made albums like this, chock full of that ‘controlled abandon’ that so thrilled us back during the Punk Wars and has continued to thrill during every subsequent wave that took that initial late-70s rebellion as its lodestar. And, yet, here we are, basking in a take-no-shit album that never takes it eye off nuance and melody and all those other elements that guarantee an album will live unto perpetuity. With that and none of that ‘further ado’ business, we give you Thirds in its entirety followed by the promised (and very candid, and thoughtful) track-by-track breakdown, which includes the quote “I wanted the tight melodic rock of Mould’s Sugar and the layered guitar sprawl of Swervedriver” and, really, they had us right there.
TRACK BREAKDOWN FOR ALBUM STREAM
David Nutt, vocals/guitar
“Carry Out”
This was the first song we wrote as a band forThirds, back in March 2019.
We had just recorded our second album, Some Years, with J. Robbins in Baltimore the
previous fall, and we’d taken a little break. For reasons of work and family but
mostly geography, the band only gets together once a month, if that, and we are
especially quiet in winter. That hibernation must’ve reenergized us, because “Carry
Out” came together quickly, with little struggle or mess. It’s a decent summation of
our various sounds/influences/plagiarisms. The verse has a twisty Hot Snakes feel.
The chorus (is it actually a chorus?) has a Sonic Youth-y ambience. But the middle
section with the dual lead guitars and noisy string bends pointed somewhere new,
at least for us. I thought of that as the Motörhead part, which ended up being very
telling. Because we are absurdly slow about everything, we only finished two more
songs in 2019. Then the pandemic happened and everything just…stopped.
“Bad Weeks”
Because it was difficult to get the four of us together during the pandemic, I began
bringing mostly finished songs to practice, just to be more efficient with our time.
That was how we operated in the early days of the band, in the late ’90s, but with
Some Yearswe got more accustomed to building the songs together. I had a nascent
version of “Bad Weeks” knocking around for a while, a kind of slow, craggy thing
with obtuse chords. It got infinitely better, as these things always do, once the other
guys dug into it. Joe’s guitar melody in the chorus really elevates the song for me.
The four of us have been playing together in various configurations for more than
25 years. In our early stuff, we were always pushing and pulling and crashing
against each other, which created an endearing clamor and tension, but it also
sounded like four dudes who couldn’t stay on the same page. Now we naturally
weave around one another, complement, buttress, abet. I’d like to think we’re more
mature, empathetic people who’ve discovered their collaborative spirit. But maybe
we’re just too lazy and tired to argue?
“Signal Burns”
This was another one I sat on, mother hen-style, for years. I wrote it for my previous
band, in 2015 or so, but I held onto it because it didn’t seem like a good fit. I think I
subconsciously knew that the song needed Brendan to drum on it. It has a sort of
early Superchunk tom-heavy beat, like “The Question is How Fast.” That sound is
coiled deep in our genome. Brendan and I began playing together in 1993 in a yelpy
high-school punk band with a serious Hüsker Dü/Superchunk fetish. So it’s
appropriate that I capped “Signal Burns” with one of those patented Bob Mould
buzzsaw solos, although I’m afraid that whenever I try to do anything that evokes
Hüsker or the Replacements, it ends up sounding like the goddamn Goo Goo Dolls.
There was a time in my life, circa 1993, that would not have been such a bad thing.
“Wreck the Decks”
David Berman has a line in one of his poems: “I am not a cub scout seduced by Iron
Maiden’s mirror worlds.” As a kid, I was totally that cub scout. (Trust me, the first
Maiden LP rips.) We’ve always had a fondness for meat-and-potatoes rock like The
Who and some schlocky prog shit for sure, but for whatever reason – boredom?
senility? – in recent years we’ve really embraced a lot of scuzzy proto-metal from
the 1970s. Black Sabbath, Motörhead, Thin Lizzy. Our tempos have gotten more
deliberate. Guitar solos and harmony leads now appear, mysteriously, like crop
circles, in the middle of songs. Joe builds his own guitar pedals, so we’ve been
slathering on the fuzz and feedback. “Wreck the Decks” is the beneficiary – or maybe
the victim – of all that ridiculousness. I double-tracked the solo to give it some Tony
Iommi gusto. Brendan added a gnarly Deep Purple-esque mellotron. If this is the
sound of our collective midlife crisis, so be it. NWOBHM 4EVER.
“Recoveries LTD”
This is our requisite plague song, although in a sense I was writing plague songs
long before the pandemic arrived. Catastrophic thinking: it’s a crutch and a copout,
probably because it’s also oddly soothing. When the coronavirus erupted, I was
already kind of living like a shut-in, so I felt uniquely prepared for the lockdown life.
If anything, I got a little too cozy. That’s “Recoveries” in a nutshell. I never
mentioned this to the band, but I had two models in mind while we were cobbling
together this record. I wanted the tight melodic rock of Mould’s Sugar and the
layered guitar sprawl of Swervedriver. I don’t think that’s exactly where we landed.
Maybe next time. Apropos of Swervedriver: the most noteworthy thing about this
song is that the other guys let me use a wah-wah pedal. I can’t believe I got away
with it.
“Old Painful”
When Eighteen Hundred formed, we were really smitten with unconventional song
structures, going riff to riff to riff, no choruses, rarely repeating parts, etc. That
seemed novel in the nineties, but feels pretty tedious now. With Some Years
and even more so with Thirds, we started including choruses, shout-alongs, hooks. You
know, obvious Songwriting 101 shit. That’s how it goes with us. We do something
that every other musician on the planet is doing, and it feels like we’ve discovered El
Dorado or Atlantis. “Old Painful” repurposes the chords of Rocket from the Crypt’s
“On a Rope” (and a million other songs) but the highlight, I think, is the slow, lurking
ending, which grew out of a spontaneous jam at practice. At a certain point, we are
going to be too old, too arthritic, and too deaf to play a lot of this shit, but as long as
we can pull off a nice moody outro, I’ll be perfectly content.
“Elevens”
We wrote “Elevens” in early 2022. By then, we had a solid batch of songs and we’d
begun recording the album ourselves at Brendan’s house, a.k.a. Stromboli Sound.
Brendan and our bassist Tom studied sound recording in college, so it made sense to
go the DIY route. The problem was that we recorded the songs sporadically, before
we had played them live, so the performances felt tentative, embryonic. Nothing
ever seemed finished. Finally, a year ago, we went to Sunwood Recording in nearby
Trumansburg and we redid everything with producer Christopher Ploss. We were
able to use a few overdubs and backing vocals from Stromboli, so that earlier work
wasn’t for naught. All told, we recorded at Sunwood for five and a half days over the
course of several months, then J. Robbins mixed everything. The guitar solo on
“Elevens” is my crowning achievement as a human being. It’s another one of those
moments, like the wah-wah thing, where I’m waiting for someone to say, “Dude, no,”
but nobody stops me. I recorded the solo live during the basic tracking, one take, no
overdubs or edits. I did my best J. Mascis, which probably sounds like a lot of
people’s worst J. Mascis.
“Another End”
We don’t have many mid-tempo songs because we’re genetically predisposed to
rushing things, I guess. But this one just clicked. Joe had a riff that was poppier than
most of our stuff. It reminded me of Archers of Loaf, so I nicked a phrase from
“Chumming the Ocean” (the bit about the hand of God) and based the lyrics around
that. I came up with the chorus and bridge, and we used another piece of Joe’s for
the long, plodding ending. That was also a new pace for us. It’s kind of, I don’t know,
delightfully Neanderthalic? I love it so much. Joe threw in one of those epic,
tumbling-headfirst-down-the-staircase pick slides, just in case anyone was missing
the point.
“Minutewomen”
This one also started with a Joe riff. He initially thought it had the feel of a laidback
Minutemen jam, so we referred to it as “Minutewomen,” and the title stuck. What
the riff really reminded me of, though, was Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.” For the
lyrics, I envisioned what middle-aged life would be like for the narrator of that song,
as if the guy went through the decades singing “I’m Eighteen” again and again and
again until everyone in his life despised and abandoned him. He’d just be this lame
hometown fixture, a has-been/never-will-be, sad and embittered, reciting his
endless tale of self-pity and woe. Then I thought, well, shit, maybe I’m that guy.
Maybe there are legions of us. So I added a coda in which all of us lie down en masse
on the floor of Lowe’s or Home Depot while our friends and spouses look on,
everyone dreaming about the lives they could’ve had. Cheerful stuff, I know. As J.
was sending us his mixes, we realized the big climax needed some backing vocals.
We shyly asked if he’d be willing to track something. An hour later, he sent us the
song and there it was, my duet with J. Robbins, preserved for the ages. Jesus, what a
feeling. J. has been one of my favorite singers since I was 15 years old, so it meant a
lot to me. Ploss plays some tasty organ on “Minutewomen,” and Joe and I do a
courageous approximation of that classic Maiden/Thin Lizzy harmony shtick. Only
when I heard J.’s mix did I realize that a mini bass solo had appeared, mysteriously,
like a crop circle, at the very end of the song. When I was younger, I would’ve been
like, “Dude, no.” Now? I think every song needs a fucking bass solo.
