Gull Boy- Hard Terrain (Gull)
Carl Thien is privy to a vast array of music both heard and unheard. Every Tuesday at 5 pm EST, he hosts Gulls Window Circus on Boston College’s WZBC-FM, often presenting thematic shows (7” releases, CDs, vinyl only, etc.) while birds chirp in the background during his mic breaks. His recurring bird references pay homage to his late pet parrot, Gull. “I used to watch Gull and yearn to see the world with the same wonder I saw in her eyes as she looked outside the window,” he says.
With all those songs at his fingertips, it’s no surprise that Thien channels that amount of wonder into original songs that have the similar kind of spark and spunk as what he plays on the radio. A native of several bands in New York and his current home of Boston, where he’s played in GingerBread Men and Turkish Delight, he anchors the music on bass in Gull Boy, creating songs that are the bastard child of garage and punk rock, in a lineage that recalls forebears like Great Plains, sans keyboards, with less whine in the vocals and a tad more angst in the lyrics.
Gull Boy’s 2020 self-titled debut moved more in the garage-pop direction with more guitars, both electric and acoustic. Hard Terrain — which repeats three tracks from the previous release — strips things down to a trio and feels a little darker. A lineup changes leaves Thien as the only carry-over, though drummer Mike Mooney (Busted Statues) also played in GingerBread Men with our hero. Guitarist Susan Barnaby brandishes the baritone guitar throughout the album, which accounts for the heavier attack. She doesn’t play leads so much as fuzz-soaked rhythm, which often makes Thien’s bass more of a lead instrument as it boils to the top. As dense as that combination might be, the trio sprinkles in some extra subtleties to realize a sound that feels current while recalling a band that could have existed on a bill at an early ’80s club show somewhere in the Rust Belt, where spiky haired art students would bop in place during their set. “Vale of Tears” has a certain groove to it, bolstered by the tight dead-silent stops between verses. They revisit those stops during “Trivial Eyes,” where Mooney adds some machine gun rolls and a genuine drum break that avoids cliches. Adding to that, Thien drills a potential object of affection: “How real is your pulsing heart/ is it just a small metal box/ planted inside your private parts/ or hidden in your favorite socks.” Every band at some point writes a paean to hedonism; the presentation makes all the difference between profound and plain old lazy. Thien’s demand adds a fresh spin: “I want a continuous weekend/ I never want to work again” (“Continuous Weekend”). Hard to argue with that.
