Music releases

Released

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Producers

Norman Dugas Production and Paul O'Neill

Catalog No.

1562

Having yanked unsuspecting bar-hoppers “down the front” and effectively pinned their ears back with a sublime blend of harmony, dissonance, hooks and brute force, THOSE LiABiLiTiES have released a seven-song set, enigmatically entitled PUBLiC THRUST. 

Ably, expertly produced and engineered by veteran duo Paul O'Neill and Norm Dugas, the band's striking sense of eclecticism fairly defies pigeonholing. If opener “Not Coming Home” invokes ghostly images of Gram Parsons jamming with Deer Tick, then what are we to make of “Miss You at All” and “Living for Myself”? Oh, right, unadulterated intensity of emotion will rage, will reflect and refract, and might even sound sweet once in a while. The centerpiece, “Baghead”, arrives from another stylistic hemisphere entirely, practically scaring the pants off listeners (in a good way), as it has on countless in-concert occasions.  The raw, but steady nerves are exposed again and again on “Asinine Mind” and “The Bitter Side”, self-actualized slabs of hot, steaming biliousness, tastefully topped with the gutsy type of guitar dynamics rarely made available these days. The “unofficial” bonus track/closer, “Soap Scum”, recorded and mixed by Greg Geisbrecht in December of 2013, stays angry while paying a stylistic debt to every great post-punk band with a soft and revealing heart. (Insert Squeeze and/or Replacements reference here!) And so the recording ends like a lot of the band's shows: “Please, sir, may I have another?”