Continuously scaling precarious heights, the better to leap into the abyss, Thinking Plague's penchant for discontinuous permutations and merciless convolution has been the one constant in their 17 year career. On Early Plague Years, ...A Thinking Plague and Moonsongs, their first two long out of print mid-80s outings, are exhumed for your edification and the effort could not be more welcome, both as a window into their slightly less intimidating formative years and, via founding member Bob Drake's immaculate, crystalline remastering, as a dramatic reanimation of the somewhat boxy and congested sounding original recordings.
One of only a handful of American outfits during the 80s navigating their way through that art-damaged wing of the prog spectrum known as Rock In Opposition, Thinking Plague liberally quaff from some of this genre's most fruitful spigots, most specifically from Fred Frith And Chris Cutler's post-Henry Cow ensemble The Art Bears, whose forlorn sturm und drang looms large over all of their work.
Setting aside the disparity of approach between Sharon Bradford, vocalist on their debut ...A Thinking Plague and her replacement in the person of Susanne Lewis, these two albums are entirely of a piece. Whether it's the coiling, roiling contrapuntal configurations of carnivalesque guitar and percolating percussion on Moonsong's "Etude For Combo" or the taffy pulled, metrically fractured and vocally filtered mindbomb titled "I Do Not Live" from ...A Thinking Plague, the fundamental impetus remains the same: gutsy, gut-wrenching and aggressively ambitious music for the astute listener.
(Originally published in Alternative Press #153, p.87; reprinted by
permission)
Amongst the vanguard of groups riding the crest of a largely unheralded contemporary avant-progressive tsunami, Denver's Thinking Plague stand out in bas-relief. Along with their equally breathtaking brethren in 5uu's (whose Dave Kerman & Bob Drake appear here), Thinking Plague remain utterly immune to the received prejudices that have obscured, marginalized and fostered an irrational resistance toward an idiom responsible for some of the 20th century's most significant musical achievements.
Really, I can't conceive of how much harder you'd have to bludgeon the minds of the human race before what seems perfectly clear to me becomes apparent to the population at large. Namely, that the manner in which Thinking Plague and the aforementioned 5uu's (along with a select array of contemporary Japanese units) have condensed only the most fertile (and often the most pulverizing) aspects of the last 30 years of progressive exploration into an Nth degree endgame is nothing short of awe inspiring.
On In Extremis (their first new release since 1989's seminal In this Life), these unsung geniuses have channeled the crushing fury of King Crimson, the existential angst of The Art Bears, the dense contrapuntal irregularity of Henry Cow and the pitch black angularity of Present into a disquieting concoction whose ceaseless paroxysms of unabated intensity and unnerving darkness are tempered only by "Les Etudes D' Organism"'s disturbed diversion into perversely cheerful and structurally perverse circus music.
Awash as this is in such a relentless tide of headspinning complexity, it can initially seem a bit tricky attempting to gain purchase on such wildly shifting tectonic plates of sound. However, for those who enjoy rising to the challenge posed by the aggressively odd and densely composed, the feverish surfeit of spellbinding ideas investigated here are almost without precedent.
(Originally published in Alternative Press #126, p.99, reprinted by
permission)
