Fred Thomas - Changer

Pitchfork 71

Fred Thomas will never create his masterpiece, and it’s better that way. An indie-rock lifer with too many aliases to count, he has been creating imperfect, emotional music so consistently that any record that felt like a capstone on a particular phase of his career would ruin his whole appeal. This is messy music that bleeds from releases to release. Epiphanies shift and deepen with each record, aging in time with Thomas.

Changer, his latest release under his own name, is the result of a series of upheavals. In the last year, Thomas got married, quit his day job, and moved to Canada, but Changer isn’t really about that—not explicitly anyway. It’s about getting older and how the weight of expectations is a bitch. In the world that Thomas writes about, personal reckonings gradually morph into—it’s trite, but let’s just get it out there—genuine joy at the places that life can take us. If there’s any unifying theme, it’s rhetorical questions like, Am I becoming who I’m supposed to be? Am I doing it at the appropriate pace? And also: what’s the appropriate pace?

There’s no real answer here, and Thomas knows that. Instead, he finds comfort in his uncertainty. On “Misremembered” he half-sings in a blunt voice that sounds frustrated and warm at the same time, “When the controlled burn that you call your 20s is finally extinguished, you know you still need someplace to go.” It feels like a mission statement.

Albums about growing up and growing older tend to appeal to people in the same demographic as the songwriter. At their best, they can become iconic markers of age—records that tell us who we are by foregoing specificity in favor of surface emotion. A good pop song can tap into the half-lidded boredom of youth or the optimism of being 20 and ready for the future. Thomas, who writes songs as short stories, imperfect and without resolution, will likely never write music like this.

Instead, he rejects the comfort of being 30-plus by writing his way through specific memories of sloppy house shows and shitty scene encounters. On “Open Letter to Forever” he sings, “Like, I remember standing out in front of the Northern, after another 15-paid gig, getting harassed by Olympia street punks (the worst!) for looking like a hipster. I wanted to be like, ‘Man I’m probably a couple years younger than your father. And I’ve traded any chance at stability for this community of people who, like, know what Black Flag is or whatever.’” His lyrics are so strong that the actual music can sometimes feel like an afterthought. When is this guy going to write a book?

There are points, though, where the instrumentation does more than just bolster Thomas’ vivid writing. “Oval Beach” is a warm electronic instrumental that sounds like Boards of Canada making dream pop, and “Echolocation” layers crashing cymbals on top of a burbling loop that gives way to a wistful cascade of horns. Here, Thomas flexes a different writing muscle and emerges as a bandleader more than a master of autobiography.

But Thomas knows what he’s good at. Closing track “Mallwalkers” is a career-best track that grapples with the value of nostalgia while attacking cynicism head on. In it, Thomas is working at a cell phone kiosk at the mall, feeling disconnected from his friends, watching them “dance around, feeling weird about fucking each other” wondering “Do I even need to be here? And why does this hurt?” Soon, he’s identifying with the seniors that walk through the mall for exercise, while “dreaming of a simple suspended eternity, where you’re stoned in your basement, playing games, hanging out with your dogs.”

At the end of “Mallwalkers” he sings, “All the lonely lights on these frozen cars, every broken-wrist handstand in some best friend’s yard, and every ugly part of everything that people keep telling you you are...They aren’t yours. They’re just wrong.” Imagine hearing that exactly when you needed to. Thomas’ music is one long effort to reach across the void and connect. He’ll never reach everyone, but with every album he gets a little closer.