The melody, already rapid-fire agitprop in the style of early-80s Billy Bragg, intensifies, and a drumbeat. “So bend your knees and bow your heads/ Save your babies, here’s your future.” And then Harris is screaming, “Yeah, here’s your future,” and the guitars get loud and the drums get loud and if heads aren’t already nodding, they probably are now.

For me, The Thermals’ “Here’s Your Future” has one of the most riveting openings to a punk rock record I’ve heard in the last ten years. It’s also lyrically clumsy, politically ham-fisted, and rarely approaches subtlety. And I rarely go a week without listening to some part of it.

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The core of the group, Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster, had played together in groups before this one; listening to The Thermals beside, say, the duo recordings they released under the name Hutch & Kathy, it’s pretty clear that the same sensibility is at work. 2006’s The Body The Blood The Machine, the album that “Here’s Your Future” opens, honed a particular direction for them, towards more thematically focused works; the album as meditation on a particular topic. The two albums that they’ve made since then, 2009’s Now We Can See and 2010’s Personal Life have both taken on larger conceptual frameworks but done so more elegantly, without some of the ham-fistedness that shows up here. Here, The Thermals have set these ten songs in a near-future United States overtaken by a particularly conservative and bigoted strain of Christianity.

The collages that dot the album’s artwork — an aesthetic descendent of Dead Kennedys collaborator Winston Smith and the juxtaposition-prone John Yates — are not subtle as they evoke rote Christian imagery and Bush-era culture clashes. The cover features Jesus with his eyes covered by a black bar, and other art features the Ten Commandments overlapping the Capitol’s architecture, a heavily redacted document with “ATTENTION ESCAPISTS!” at the top, and a car’s rear-view mirror where surging flames are visible.

Over the course of The Body The Blood The Machine’s ten songs, some of them frenetic in their tempo and others content to proceed with a stately chug, the society described on the album is delineated; the narrator of several of these songs vacillates between wanting to run from this society and (in “A Return to the Fold”) embracing it. If you’re thinking Nineteen Eighty-Four here, you’re in the right ballpark. There’s more than a little fascism in the society described — from the references to a “new master race” in the opener to the mention of “Nazi halos” in “I Might Need You to Kill.” Listening to these songs, it isn’t clear if Harris and Foster are suggesting that this is the end point of modern conservatism or if they’ve opted to go for a worst of all possible worlds, one where a kind of Christian Identity-based state has arisen. In the end, it might not matter — The Body The Blood The Machine is a powerful album, but it isn’t a particularly nuanced one.

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I’ve never been sure why this album has gripped me as much as it does. I have friends who experienced in their youth a give-and-take between fundamentalist Christianity and punk rock, and others who have told stories of faiths that aren’t too far removed from the borderline-fascist creed referenced here. This year, I’ve read Jeanette Winterson’s terrifying account of growing up in a repressive branch of Christianity in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? I’ve read the political writers Will Saletan and Ross Douthat discuss the evolution of Christianity, and the ways in which it’s been adopted by the politically conservative.
This has not been my experience with Christianity. I grew up Episcopalian. There wasn’t much in the way of repression to be found there: no fear of damnation, no conflict between the books I read and the messages I heard in church on Sunday mornings. And while I can remember driving home from church with a Bad Religion tape playing on my car’s stereo, I never found much transgressive about my listening habits and the faith I’d been raised in, even as I got more and more into punk rock. About the only part of this album that really resonates with any vestige of my younger self is Harris’s line in “A Pillar of Salt” about “our filthy bodies,” though that (for me) had little to do with any concept of sin and desire.

***

For all that I find some of the imagery and wordplay here heavy-handed, though, there’s no rule that punk rock needs to be subtle. For every Against Me! playing textual and narrative games with their lyrics to a smart poltical end, there’s a Team Dresch, who well understand that the best political critiques are often the loudest. (“Hate The Christian Right” is an utterly brutal attack on a specific series of conservative politics; it’s loud and savage in its sentiments, and it’s impossible to forget.) The Body The Blood The Machine isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s not like it needs to be.

Even so, that doesn’t explain why this album hits so close to home for me — there are plenty of punk records that hit on a visceral level, but haven’t wormed themselves into my head the way this one has. My own mild philosophical differences with Episcopalianism seem insufficient grounds for my gut-level appreciation of such a gut-level attack on Christianity.

And yet, for all that I would probably point a newcomer to The Thermals to Now We Can See or Personal Life, it’s The Body The Blood The Machine that I return to again and again, looking for that same thrill and that same rush. I don’t think that this is an example of the tired old “punk rock became my religion” trope, but I also worry that it isn’t far from it, that my attraction to this album suggests that its fears of the allure of an all-controlling religious devotion are more resonant than I might like to admit. Alternately, as Harris sings with equal parts elation and terror: here’s your future.

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Jóhannsson’s latest album, The Miners’ Hymns, is the soundtrack to the film of the same name by the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison. It’s his boldest work yet, ending on the hopeful, resonant themes that emerge from “The Cause of Labour Is the Hope of the World.” Over the course of the last few months, Jóhannsson has responded to questions I’ve sent; what follows is the result.

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The Rumpus: Did the process of creating The Miners’ Hymns differ substantially from your previous work?

Jóhann Jóhannsson: What interested me was the idea of making a kind of requiem for a lost industry and for the human aspect of this. Coal mining was an important industry in the region for 200 years and over a few years in the ’80s it was more or less shut down with significant consequences for the community. In the North of England, there was a brass band in every village and the band members were mostly coal miners. The brass bands were the soundtrack to the coal miners’  lives, from cradle to grave. Even after the industry had disappeared, the brass bands still remained and are now manned by the sons and daughters of coal miners. I was interested in working with this heritage of brass music and it for me it was important to work with local players. We worked with the NASUWT Riverside Band, which has origins in the Pelton Fell Colliery band which was formed in 1870, so they represent 140 years of history.

Rumpus: The “requiem for a lost industry” idea seems to dovetail with some of the themes introduced on IBM 1401 and Fordlandia–were there themes or motifs that all three works share?

Jóhannsson: Yes, there are themes that relate to industry, technology, workers’ revolt and such things. Obsolete technologies and the industries etc. IBM 1401 and Fordlandia are intended as part of a series while Miners’ Hymns is on its own, but they do have a lot in common.

Rumpus: How did you first come into contact with Bill Morrison? Had you known him before work began on the film?

Jóhannsson: David Metcalfe from Forma originally approached me with the idea of doing an audiovisual piece working with the mining heritage of the north of England. Bill was one of the filmmakers he suggested as collaborators and as I’d loved his film Decasia, I was keen on working with him. I saw Decasia years ago at a film festival and I thought it was an amazing piece of work

Rumpus: What was the process of working with Morrison like?

Jóhannsson: We spent some time in the region, Bill researching local film archives and me working with local musicians. We talked about what kind of imagery we were interested in and the structure and so on, but the music was composed first and the film was edited to the music. We premiered the film in Durham Cathedral with live music and this was the first time I’d seen the finished film.

Rumpus: Do you feel that the music that you’ve written for films differs substantially from your more standalone work?

Jóhannsson: I approach things very much in the same way, whether it’s music for a film or one of my own albums. I don’t put a special hat on to write film music or for anything else. Of course writing for film places some restrictions on you, you generally don’t have a blank slate, there are certain parameters already laid out, such as structure that you have to follow to a certain extent. In the case of  The Miners’ Hymns, it was different because the music was written first, so the music laid out the structure of the film.

Rumpus: Much of your work that’s been released in the US was originally written to accompany films or theatrical productions. Do you think that someone listening to the music outside of this context is getting the full experience of it?

Jóhannsson: My albums are all created and intended as stand-alone pieces. Even though an album like Englabörn is based on music written for a play, it was significantly re-structured and rearranged for the album, creating something which hopefully stands on its own. The same goes for IBM 1401, A User’s Manual, which was written for a dancer, but always intended as a standalone piece as well. For me the choreography is like a branch that grows out of the original idea and the album is another branch. I don’t think one precludes the other and I think people will experience different levels of the pieces depending on how they are presented–as a concert performance, on record, or as theatrical performance –there’s no hierarchy, they’re all equal levels.

Rumpus: How do you balance music that’s complementary to a particular work with qualities that make it satisfying as a standalone work?

Jóhannsson: For a piece of music to work as an album you have to approach it on the medium’s own terms. For a soundtrack album like And in the endless pause… the music was extensively rearranged and re-recorded to make it work as an album.

Rumpus: Looking at your body of work, the arrangements on Dís stand out–do you plan to return to writing for a more rock-oriented ensemble?

Jóhannsson: Dís was a soundtrack record and soundtrack work gives you freedom to experiment with different sounds and styles. I like to use the opportunity when writing soundtracks to work with sounds I would perhaps stay away from on my solo albums. Some of the Dís record is closer to Apparat Organ Quartet, which is one of my side projects. AOQ released an album last year in Iceland, which will be released in Europe this autumn.

Rumpus: Does the music that you play in the Apparat Organ Quartet have any effect on your composition?

Jóhannsson: Apparat Organ Quartet is a collaborative project with four other composers, so there’s much more than just my voice in there. It’s outwardly quite different from my solo music, but there are a lot of things in common, if you dig deeper. For me there’s very little difference between AOQ and my solo work but I realize that may be a minority opinion. For me it’s a matter of instrumentation more than anything else. There are common threads like minimalism, krautrock and electro-acoustic music that inform both projects.

Rumpus: Besides the groups you were writing this piece for, did the music itself draw any influence from the traditional repertoire of brass bands?

Jóhannsson: I listened to quite a bit of brass music as I prepared for the piece and the music I connected to the most were the hymns – -this 19th century religious, Salvation Army music that the English brass bands performed a lot. The title of the piece comes from a hymn composed by a miner to commemorate a mining accident in the town of Gresford in the 1930s where hundreds of miners died–it’s well known in the region and is commonly called “The Miners’ Hymn.” It’s an incredibly affecting piece of music and when I heard it, the project kind of fell into place for me, it gave me a key to how to approach this–although I don’t refer to the hymn musically in any way, I just borrowed the title.

Rumpus: Are there any plans to continue the series that began with IBM 1401 and Fordlandia?

Jóhannsson: Yes, I’m working on the third installment now. It will be a 40 minute piece for symphony orchestra that will premiere in Winnipeg, Canada, on February 3rd. I will record it shortly after that and hopefully release [it] some time next year.

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• The Rumpus Interview with Jesse Sykes
• Albums of Our Lives: The Thermals’ The Body The Blood The Machine
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