The Thermals, Now We Can See

There aren't many punk rock bands more straightforward, in some ways, than the Thermals; there also aren't many more smart and ambitious. One way to hear the Portland band's fourth album is as their toughest, sturdiest punk record yet, a fusillade of wired, hammering, fist-in-the-air anthems. Listen to it that way, and it's built around its title track, a declaration of victory ("Our enemies lie dead on the ground, and still we kick") with an irresistible "oh-way-oh" hook. But it's also a precisely crafted, despairing concept album that sets up its central conceit with its opening salvo, "When I Died," in which a man tries in vain to save himself by becoming a fish and returning to the ocean.

Recorded as a duo of core members Hutch Harris (singing and guitar) and Kathy Foster (bass and drums) — the same lineup that made an album as Hutch and Kathy before the Thermals began — Now We Can See is packed stem-to-stern with images of reverse evolution: too much water, disintegrating bodies, collective transformation and collective delusion. Harris's lyrics are often in the first-person plural, in the past tense, or both; they're more about the human condition than about a particular persona. They're also as punchy and bitter as a triple espresso, and you can almost smell the caffeine through the speakers as he declaims them.

As always, every Thermals song crams in as many foursquare, head-banging riffs as they can get away with, although this time they've augmented the basement-practice-space arrangements with a few subtle touches, like somebody walloping the bejesus out of a piano in the background of "You Dissolve." The album's even punctuated in the middle by the longest and most restrained Thermals song yet — nearly six minutes of "At the Bottom of the Sea," a slowly respiring variation on the Velvet Underground's "Ocean." That "restrained" is relative, of course: by the end, they've stomped on their fuzzboxes again, and Harris is yowling a repudiation of the air itself. You can hurl yourself around to Now We Can See, but it also rewards sitting very quietly and thinking about it.