The Thermals in Chicago, February 28, 2007

A sure-fire fix for the February blues

By Jeremy Ohmes
Published: March 2nd, 2007 | 5:59pm

Our great agit-pop saviors from the Northwest rode into town on Wednesday night and rescued us, Chicagoans from a February we couldn’t wait to forget. I mean our team blew the big game, our corrupt politicians stayed in office, and our weather was an arctic basket case, but the Thermals kept us momentarily insulated from our collective Seasonal Affective Disorders.

After taking the stage of the sold-out Subterranean, Hutch Harris, Kathy Foster, and company wasted no time in amassing the multitudes; forty-five seconds to be exact before every man, woman, and child was screaming along to each and every word of “Here’s Your Future,” the appropriate opening rally cry. The shout-along didn’t stop for the next hour as the quartet scorched through 22 songs from all across their three LPs. Instant pop anthem after anthem like “Our Trip,” “End to Begin,” and “No Culture Icons” emboldened a sweaty, all-ages audience to yell dissent from the floor to the balcony to the rafters of the lofty SubT (which should get props for filling the void of decent all-ages venues in Chicago). But it was the blood-pumping tunes off their latest album, The Body, the Blood, the Machine, that really got the crowd all riled up, inciting a friendly mosh pit in front of the stage. You see this was a Thermals show, not a Dead Kennedys concert, so the slam-dancing was fairly subdued — like a bunch of caffeinated kids in a Burger King bouncy castle.

Closing their set with the crowd-pleasers “God and Country” and “A Pillar of Salt,” the Thermals had the indie-rock rabble pleading for more — “Two, no five, no seven more!” But a two-song encore was all they could fit in before the curfew came crashing down. The kids filed home, hoarse, sticky, and satisfied, while the rest of us milled about drinking, rasping, reminiscing, and sucking in the swollen, fist-pumped air. The Thermals had put on a helluva show and punctuated the last night of an otherwise questionable month with a resounding exclamation point.