I missed the Thermals‘ second and most recent visit to Cardiff, but saw their first. Roughly 25 people turned up to see them tear through most of More Parts Per Million and Fuckin A at the Barfly in 2004, and yeah, it’s a hoary old cliché to say it but they really did play as if it were packed to the rafters with tumbling bodies. Commitment, passion, energy; easy to parody but hard to deny, these are the qualities that have kept Portland’s finest playing (very) steadily larger halls over the last eight, nine years. That and blistering, yearning tunes, the personal and political writ large in new aggregations across each of their five albums for fellow North-Western mainstays Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars. They’ve managed to mature without sounding jaded, or boiling down the joy and the hope from their voices to just bitterness or dry observational ashes, and the euphoria in the songs is still as infectious as it’s always been.

Support comes in crackling, good-time, jerk-baiting form with pottymouthed Atlanta foursome The Coathangers. Judging by their cheerfully gross-out name and no-shit attitude and the scuzzy, clattering party punk thrash of Bratmobile-meets-Erase Errata second album Scramble, they should be massively fun and quite possibly an education for any lippy or reticent young men in the crowd. Splendid.

Props to Cardiff’s own Among Brothers, who’ve hopped aboard this bill fairly late in the day and who’ll tackle quite possibly their biggest and most partisan crowd to date. Not easy to see how their twinkly post-rock and delicate rumbles of electronic percussion will go across with an indie-punk crowd, but they’ve got a batch of fine songs and no shortage of confidence about them so you’d hope they’ll do just fine.

THE THERMALS
THE COATHANGERS
AMONG BROTHERS

Thursday 31st March 2011
8pm / £10 adv / 14+
The Fleece, 12 St Thomas Street, Bristol BS1 6JJ

http://www.thethermals.com
http://www.myspace.com/fuckthecoathangers
http://www.myspace.com/amongbrothers