Live Review: The Thrills @ The Mercury Lounge NYC [11.9.07]

The Thrills are one of those post-modern bands that make your head hurt if you think about it too hard. They're Irish and have a huge Irish following. It's not quite The Pogues but the Mercury Lounge is easily a quarter-Irish on this Friday night. And, with all due respect, the 25-percent of the crowd that claims Irish heritage is predictably drunk and making themselves heard. But. The Thrills don't play Irish music. They play a sun-shiny version of California-pop. There is absolutely no connection between where they come from and what they play. This is art entirely detached from meaning. Don't even bother trying to piece this thing together.

What is connected is that The Thrills have a great new album, Teenager and they're in New York for the first time in two years promoting the release. They open with the album's first, and possibly best song, "Midnight Choir." We're pushing midnight on the Lower East Side and the Mercury Lounge is completely sold out and singing along. The band rolls into material from their first record playing, "Big Sur" and "Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far)." The songs are cloyingly cute and would remind you of The Beach Boys covering Neil Young's catalogue. There are some obvious limits to their earlier work.

But the new record is deeper and the sonic differences are many. The Thrills are willing to sound similar on all their three albums, but they're not willing to stay in one place. They use the mandolin prominently on the new disc and it seeps out of the Mercury Lounge speakers like a sunny June morning. The silky three-part harmonies the band uses to flesh out their arrangements also sound well-rendered and someone should probably throw the sound guy twenty bucks because he's making all this fit together.

The Thrills smartly stay away from most of the material from their second album, Let's Bottle Bohemia. It's the record that put their career, their major label deal, and their finances in jeopardy and it seems like they know. The sneak in "Found My Rosebud," and it sounds fine but they clearly would rather operate of the limited but charming first album and the more rich, if in places incomplete, third album. Teenager is a real ode to youth culture, the beauty and the beast of being young. For a band three albums deep in their career, it's a nice image.

Singing the chorus of "This Year," lead singer, Conor Deasy says over and over again "this year will be our year/this year will be our year." When the song finishes, he backs from the mic and says "thank you" with a little bow. There is something particularly gracious going on here. He's not kidding and he's not faking. He really is thankful. For a band back from the brink, with a good new album and a capacity crowd, it makes sense why. There's a connection there. Even if it is an Irish band singing California.