Thank You is a No Wave and Post-Punk inspired trio made up of Jeffrey McGrath, Michael Bouyoucas and Elke Wardlaw, Terrible Two is their debut album and is being released by experimental and indie heavyweights Thrill Jockey. The act are one of a number, (Beach House, Wye Oak, Thrushes, Ecstatic Sunshine, Dan Deacon), that have recently sprung out of the burgeoning underground scene in the economically decaying, (if HBO’s The Wire is to be believed), city of Baltimore, Maryland. The band display a good deal of potential on this first offering, smothering together a bunch of different techniques, and at the same time discarding others, in an attempt to create something new and compelling.The thing that comes through immediately is the rhythmic sense all three of the musicians employ on their respective instruments, but there is more happening under the surface. The drums are constantly hyper, rolling on and on with every piece of the kit getting a whack at least once during any given song, second track ‘Embryo Imbroglio’ is the tightest example of this, although just about all the tracks have a similar drum style. The one exception is ‘Self With Yourself’ where there is a very un-bassy sound to the kit and then later even a conga sound. The organ is sometimes employed as the bass, opening track ‘Empty Legs’ sees the organ buzzing low below everything else and alternating between two notes. Often the higher pitched notes are put into a minimalist repetition, short hard sounds that are unrecognizable as a melody, the middle of ‘Self With Yourself’ has this squeaky, creaky technique. The minimalist style is matched nicely with a drone sensibility on other tracks, such as ‘Pregnant Friends’ and album closer ‘Terrible Two’, where it sounds like a fluffy cloud of sound, rolling and roiling across the sky. The guitar sound is heavily influenced by post-punk angularity and no-wave atonality, a melange of styles that recall Television, Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, among others. ‘Embryo Imbroglio’ shows blunt sounding little rhythmic notes where you can hear the pick scraping over the strings, before a fuzzy amphetamine fuelled riff swoops around and around. An often under-utilized clean and high up the neck style can be found on ‘Empty Legs’, twinkling and distinct notes adding a snatch of clarity. Often on this album the guitar brides the gap between rhythm, melody and drone, repeating riffs over and over that sound so fuzzy and indistinct it seems to turn into a sheet of sound, droning on, before pulling apart and sweeping back into semi-melody, as in the last quarter of ‘Self With Yourself’.While Terrible Two does get your blood running, does urge you to run around like a mad man, there is still something that mitigates the album, and it’s hard to put your finger on it. Perhaps the style the band are presenting is not well served by the production, the drums are flat and backgrounded too much of the time, the guitar is boxed in a bit. But that doesn’t feel like enough. Maybe something has been stripped from the band by recording, they are, so I’ve heard, an excellent live act full of primal shuddering and chest thumping to their rhythmic quality. Possibly what stops me from embracing the album is the number and length of the tracks versus the ideas within, sometimes there will be three different song ideas pushed into one long, disjointed track, where three different tracks might have flowed better.The band have waved a cheery goodbye to pop song structure, a typical sense of narrative and any vestiges of traditional accessibility (melody, tuneful singing and etc). If Thank You can return with something a little better recorded, a little more cohesive, then the results could be very exciting indeed. 67%Links Thank You [myspace] [record label]