#28

#28. Nothing But Thieves - Amsterdam (#70, 2017)

6th of 2017

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In late 2008, I received a massive boon in my life in the form of a laptop that had sufficient internet access. Prior to this, I was using a desktop that was gradually falling apart, took an incredulous length of time to boot up (and required arcane situational knowledge to do so), with extremely capped internet speed & downloading. It may as well have been nothing at that point. The laptop gave me freedom and feels like the real starting point for me with a lot of things. One such thing is my extremely long-kept history of music listening stats. I had them on the old computer and largely inflated the stats because I liked recording them and seeing how they changed over time. iTunes having a default 'Top 25 Most Played' smart playlist possibly did a number on my productivity and the way I took my music listening habits.

I don't claim to remember what the first song I played was on this laptop, but I do know that after a little while, I chose to look at the Most Played playlist for the first time, and the winner drawn out of the hat here was "Again and Again" by Harlequin League, with roughly 10 plays. This is admittedly a very obscure song by a Perth band who were making very slight ripples at the time but never got any bigger. They're not even one of the more famous 'clown' bands in Western Australia. Still, I was impressionable and it didn't stop the song from being one of my favourites going around at the time.

I don't think I really codified it at the time, as it was more of the kind of upbeat indie rock I tended to like at the time, but in hindsight, there was a slight pattern emerging. You might be able to gather from just the title, but it is a song that says 'again and again' many times. It's not the only time I fell under a spell like this. Around the same time was another niche but beloved track for me, Tom Ugly's "Roll Again". A few months later in 2009, and the band Numbers Radio have a new song called "Boring". It's probably the most blatant example of any of these, because despite not including it in their title, they get some serious mileage out of the word 'again'. If you've never heard of any of these bands (or only heard of them through me), then that's not particularly surprising, and probably exemplifies the sheer depths I'll apparently go into to get what I want. I am unsure if it's a coincidence that the song I've recorded more listens of than any other also starts itself off by rhyming 'again' with 'again'. The artist behind that song will eventually appear on this list, providing some closure to this bit, I'm sure.

You might know where I'm going with this. Nothing But Thieves understood the assignment and took me back nearly a decade in time with this one. Only this time, more than a handful more people joined in with me on this quest. You think they're just gonna shift this to an 'over and over', Hot Chip type beat, but then they hit you with again, again, and again. As far as I'm concerned, this really is the second coming of that Harlequin League song. Slightly less speedy and more crunchy guitars, but the core identity is all there, and they know deep down it's just a fun thing to sing along with.

I'd love to cap this all off with a fascinating back story for Nothing But Thieves but I don't really have one. They're just a band from Essex that quickly got snapped up by a major label and so were already pretty popular by the time they released their debut album. Enough so that they've never missed the UK top 10 with any of their albums. Their 5th album will come out by the time this post goes live but I suspect they'll maintain the streak (it did).

I didn't have especially strong feelings about the band at this time. I was very aware of them, but I paired them up with Wolf Alice at the time as two UK bands that were getting a lot of buzz and releasing their first (and second) albums around the same time. While I found Wolf Alice to be thrilling and exciting every step of the way, Nothing But Thieves were just the adequate brother. The two singles they had on the radio at the time were "Itch" and "Trip Switch" which were fine, they had memorable hooks, just nothing that made me want to go back to them. The single "Wake Up Call" came up next and was a little more my speed, a bit of a middle point between the reckless energy of Muse and the restrained care of Coldplay.

I'm not sure what happened shortly after this but everything clicked pretty quickly with their next album, "Broken Machine". I don't think it's a flawless masterpiece or anything, but basically all of my favourite songs by this band are on it. At the time it felt like a well I could just keep drawing from. I had a lot of love for "Amsterdam" naturally, but it's also those handful of other songs I keep going back to. There's the title track which is a little on the mellow side for the most part with some creative guitar work & vocal distortion. "I'm Not Made by Design" takes me back to 2008 for a different reason, with its Dead Letter Circus intensity coupled with a late guitar riff that recalls "How Do We Know" by The Living End. There's also the song "Afterlife" which I evoked once before (#195) and is a great closer to the album. Sometimes you just tap into a really solid guitar and bass tone and everything sounds great coming out of it. Most of the album is pretty good, but I think if you just take the best half of it, you've got just about the best pop rock EP I've ever heard. Actually they did release an EP just after this and "Forever & Ever More" is another winner, very Queens of the Stone Age inspired I feel.

Something I think they did manage to utilise from this point is recognising what the band's calling card really is. Lead singer Conor Mason has some incredible pipes on him and can turn these songs up to eleven on a moment's notice. Something he has a habit of doing is taking moments of songs where many artists would just run through the same intonation or recording, and then taking it in a slightly different direction on the next run through. It gives you more things to listen out for, and is a solid way to finish ramping everything up towards a song's climax. "Amsterdam" runs a little lengthy for what it is at four and a half minutes, that's three and a half minutes after it's already hit you with the big anthemic chorus. It's all to prime you for the song's real climax, when the music cuts away for a moment to let Conor do his thing before coming crashing back. It's like, yeah, you guys know how to make rock music that fires on the appropriate cylinders, keep that up.