Thrice- Beggars (****)

How does a band follow up a 4-disc concept record where each disc thematically explores the natural elements fire, water, air, and earth? Well, you could go grander, offering fans a more complicated work to digest that keeps your work inaccessible.

Or you could be like Thrice, and strip everything back to its bare essentials.

After the last chapter of The Alchemy Index was released, Thrice spent some time on the road but quickly jumped at the opportunity to get back into the studio. The result is Beggars, a 10-song album that finds the band focusing less on being studio wizards and more on being an organic four piece.

Make no mistake, however, stripped back and concise do not translate into a sonic regression. In fact, fans of earlier Thrice works such as Identity Crisis and The Illusion Of Safety will find that Beggars has little in common those albums save for Dustin Kensrue’s sandpaper vocals. Instead, Thrice has opted not to experiment with lush and meticulously crafted textures, but with solid riffs and quirky rhythms.

From the opening pulse of Eddie Breckenridge’s lumbering bass on “All The World Is Mad” to Teppei Teranishi’s bluesy guitar noodling on “The Weight,” Thrice make it clear that Beggars is an album of songs, not symphonic statements. Instead, the album comes across as a song cycle that’s far more immediate than anything off The Alchemy Index. On Beggars, tracks are more concerned with groove, feeling far looser than anything the band has done before.

At first, listeners will be taken aback by how subtle the record is, and they should be. All the tracks here, especially the heavier ones, are constructed to be more intimate than bludgeoning. What that means is that Thrice has evened out their sound, pushing their delicate and soft passages together with a small dabbling of their discordant take on post-hardcore.

For a band that has spent two releases attempting to separate their sound into distinct parts, it’s refreshing to find them combining these elements in a fashion that seems effortless.

“Circles” is easily the album’s strongest track, featuring Riley Breckenridge’s fluttering drums as they ride fluid, shimmering guitar lines, and warm bass work. Kensrue’s somber vocals push the track into melancholy as the group’s rich guitar work begins to climb and soar. With smooth changes and seamless transitions, songs like “Circles” display a band that has developed into a group of great songwriters with each successful release.

Much like The Alchemy Index before it, Beggars finds Kensrue’s lyrics weighing weighty existential musings. Cuts such as “Wood & Wire” sport lines like, “Dead man walking down the hall/To meet a mess of wood and wire/Lead me to where mean fear to tread/Towards the thing I most desire…” giving listeners ideas and concepts that aren’t simply surface level hooks. Set against rich piano and hazy feedback, Kensrue’s lyrics remain poetic as he contemplates the humanity that comes from personal struggle. Elsewhere,

However, the album’s greatest strength is how well its overall concept permeates throughout all the musical elements. On Beggars, the guitars range from fluid to gritty, the bass fuzzy to full. No robotic distortion, no slick studio sheen. Thrice sound like a group of men making music rather than men displaying music that’s been tinkered and toyed with. There is a natural quality to Beggars, one that gives the songs soul and life when their parts seem simple and pedestrian. It’s a record that’s light on indulgence save for sparse piano here and there. Instead, it represents a band creating expansive arrangements and visceral movements using modest means, perfectly falling in line with the album’s muse.

Thrice expertly displays this on the album’s closing track “Beggars,” marrying messy feedback with fluid melodies against Kensrue’s bluesy howl. In one fell swoop, the band show the triumphs of man only go so far, but our unity stems from our humanity, “As you lie in your bed/Does the thought haunt your head/That your really rather small?/If there's one thing I know in this life/We are beggars all…”

In an age of auto-tuned theatrics, recycled pop compression, and expensive pro-tools worked sounds, it’s a breath of fresh air to find a record that revels in its simplicity. It harkens back to a time where the human spirit could find itself seeped in creation rather than putting out a product.

In that respect, Thrice should be proud, for they’ve achieved that revelation thorough the most basic of means.

Key Cuts: Circles, Wood & Wire, Beggars

Sounds Like: Ghosts I-V (Nine Inch Nails), OK Computer (Radiohead), The Joshua Tree (U2)

Click on the artwork to sample some of Beggars for yourself!