The Thrills - Teenager

Unlike some people I know, I don't own a Zune, so I have to discover music the old fashioned way: by going to the record store and listening. I try to make it a point to get to my favorite record store at least once a month to check out whatever is on the listening station for that month. Sometimes this means wading through multi-disc compilations of Brazilian folk music, or albums by underground emo bands that make you wonder how any emo bands manage to get aboveground. But every once in a while I'll discover a great new band, or an old but heretofore ignored band, and my record collection is all the richer for it. All told, the twenty or so minutes I spend tucked inside the listening station headphones is time well spent, and almost always yields at least one new discovery.

I consider this time spent listening to be an essential component of the ongoing search for new music, and I thoroughly expect to find something worth buying every time I step into the record store; in fact, I'm not sure that I have ever left a record store empty-handed, with the possible exception of my multi-week quest to track down a copy of Girl Talk's Night Ripper album. What I live for, though, are those moments when I discover an album that's not just the next in a long line of purchases, but that becomes an essential record, a linchpin in the collection. These are the "where have you been all my life?" moments. These are the albums that, thirty seconds into the first track, you already know you're going to buy. Pretend You're Alive by Lovedrug and Punches by World Leader Pretend fall into this category. Listening to these albums was like opening that box on Pulp Fiction and seeing the glow of what may or may not have been Ving Rhames's soul.

(By the way, when was the last time Ving Rhames was in a movie? He pops up every few years in the latest Mission: Impossible in the quintessential "hey, I still do movies" moment, but other than that I can't think of a single thing he's done lately, which is a shame. Imdb claims that he was in seven movies in 2007. Have you seen any of them? I doubt if all seven of these movies actually exist.)

My latest listening station treasure is the album Teenager by the Thrills. I would describe it as a non-French Phoenix, by way of Travis, except that they don't very much sound like either of those bands. They combine generally up-tempo, bright-as-Tatooine's-twin-suns acoustic guitars with the occasional piano chord and banjo pluck, and Conor Deasy's breathy vocals sound like each syllable has been squeezed through one of those Play-Doh macaroni presses. This is one of those albums that constantly reminds you of something else, but you can never put your finger on it. For the briefest moment, for example, I wanted to compare one of these tracks to the Go! Team, as preposterous as that sounds. All told, it's a concise album of bittersweet pop, perfect for those autumn days that look warm but aren't, as summer backpedals into winter and you're starting to figure out that nobody loves you anymore.

Buy this record; you won't regret it.