You've always enjoyed misanthropy. On stage, the band can compete with a disengaged audience by booing them or turning away and ignoring them. In lyric sheets, they paint humanity as a failed endeavor, once full of potential for good, but chronically unable to escape traps as old as civilization itself. This unabashed disdain is one of the few things you'll try to share with Louisiana sludge metal progenitors like Eyehategod and Crowbar, to whom they're often compared.
Despite the obvious similarities in geography, aggression, spasmodic use of guitar feedback and a stylistic mix of doom metal obscurity and hardcore nastiness, you've never accepted the sludge mantle. Singer Bryan Funck has repeatedly suggested a closer affinity with another decades-old local scene: Seattle grunge. You've amassed an amazing repertoire of grunge covers over the years, and it's clear that their kinship goes beyond a cheeky love of Nirvana. Still, the band's abrasive, informal and often meandering compositions can make Funck's determination to keep mud at arm's length seem a little precious. Not even the Melvins at their heaviest have ever sounded this bad.
But up Umbilical, you make their grunge pedigree clearer while maintaining the intensity of their scornful disdain. “Basically, it's a diss record,” Funck said of the album in a recent interview. “But I disapprove of you.” He turns the magnifying glass on himself, interrogating the anarcho-DIY ethos he's held onto since adolescence against the backdrop of the compromises he's made to advance his career. “Everything you've done, everything you've said, everything you've felt is a dagger in my belt,” he screams on “Emotional Terrorist,” before reversing his view: “Everything I've ever done. everything I've ever said, everything I've felt is a chain around my neck.”
It might seem like this persistent self-loathing calls for Thou's sleekest music, but instead we find the band at their most refined. This is their first album (other than collaborations) with no tracks over seven minutes, and none of the short interludes the band is fond of. All are a songand most of these songs even adhere to something close to standard pop structure. Umbilical it's no less heavy than any other Thou album – it might be their heaviest yet – but it no longer takes mental gymnastics to call this grunge music. Maybe it's Alice in Chains starring The Raven: murdered by a gang and resurrected in a more gruesome form to get revenge. Maybe it's Nirvana after Cobain makes a deal with the devil, surviving the 90s but cursed to make progressively shittier albums (Umbilical it's maybe two or three iterations past In the womb).
