3 out of 5

Label: Kill Rock Stars

Produced by: Chris Walla

Half inspirational, emotional, fist-pumping anthems; half weak-sauce pop-punk.  Feel free to apply that description to most Thermals releases.

After sprinting out of the gates with several raw bleats of repetitive but enthusiastic lo-fi punkish albums, The Thermals seemed to discover patience and figure out how to wed their three-chord aggression to some nuance on The Body, The Blood, The Machine.  Then, I dunno, Kill Rock Stars and John Congleton happened and they went in a rather bland pop direction for their followup, necessitating the inevitable ‘return to form’ of Personal Life.  Or perhaps attempted ‘return,’ anyway.  The attention-grabbing energy of those first releases has dissipated a bit, and has been blended with some of the more refined compositional skills displayed on that third disc, and the results are fittingly somewhere in the middle of those styles, with incredibly generic tunes highlighted almost solely by Hutch Harris’ eager shouts, keeping us head-bobbing long enough for bassist Kathy Foster and drummer Westin Glass to help push any given track into something more propulsive and noteworthy in its final moments.

Harris, lyrically, is still forever trying to write something more important than vague relationship tales, but we don’t get beyond some standard proclamations that vary in effectiveness depending on if the song is in pop mode or punk mode.  Personal Life finds The Thermals back with producer Chris Walla, giving things a familiar, stripped down sound, but it sounds a bit ‘faux’ this time, and not just as a result of a group trying to record as quick and dirty as possible.

Sometimes, none of this matters, and you’re just grooving along to a suddenly immersive bit of frenzy.  The rest of the time, though…