The Thrills – ‘Let’s Bottle Bohemia’ (Virgin) Released 13/09/04

When opening track ‘Tell Me Something I Don’t Know’ finishes with a discordant crash of instruments you might be forgiven for thinking that The Thrills have returned with an edgier, rawer sound on their second album ‘Let’s Bottle Bohemia’. They haven’t. Despite them telling us over and over again that this is the case, The Thrills have returned with an album that sounds more like The Thrills than they even managed on ‘So Much for the City’.

There are less of the Beach Boy-esque Harmonies that featured on the band’s debut, released just over a year previous, but everything that wasn’t Brian Wilson inspired, everything that sounded like The Thrills has been bottled and distilled and condensed into a purified Thrillsian sound. And it’s hard to ascertain whether this is a good or bad thing as Conor Deasy’s affected drawl almost smothers the record.

There are some noticeable additions to their sound however, like the string section on ‘Whatever Happened to Corey Haim’, which either consciously or subconsciously lifts the string motif from the theme tune of Eighties alien sitcom Mork and Mindy and several other string arrangements crop up, some of which are by Van Dyke Parks who also worked on the Beach Boys’ ‘Smile’. REM’s Peter Buck, a self-confessed Thrills fan, also makes an appearance on a couple of tracks, most noticeably picking away on mandolin on ‘Faded Beauty Queens’.

So, not really a massive departure from their last album, their fixation with the USA and the sound of its West Coast is still in tact. Though they have definitely made a step forward in terms of the depth of their sound and breadth of their influences, this is an album that sounds like it might have been recorded in LA sometime in the early Seventies (not Noughties), when bohemia was still an intriguing phenomenon.