Category: Featured

In an era of content slop, pseudo-art, and AI, Thank God For Science is a breath of fresh air — proof that there are still art-weirdos out there who value creativity over commercial appeal. To me, Thank God For Science is an aesthetic-first, audience-second band — something that might sound negative but is actually their greatest strength. In short, they’ve got authenticity. They care more about their craft than about how it’s received (they’re certainly not making pop music). The result is a genuinely challenging, fascinating, and refreshingly unpredictable listening experience.

When I listen to Thank God For Science, I often find myself caught off guard — in the groove of a jazzy progression when, suddenly, a xylophone or twangy ranch guitar bursts in. What should clash somehow blends into something mesmerizing and, honestly, mind-blowing.

According to their website, Thank God For Science began when Jeremy Moses Curtis (Booker T, Jeffrey Foucault) turned years of home demos into the instrumental album Volume One with producer Marc Pinansky. The core band — drummer Peter MacLean (Maceo Parker), keyboardist James Rohr (The Blue Ribbons), and guitarist Mike Castellana — recorded the tracks over a weekend, later joined by Laurence Scudder (Brothers McCann) on viola and Barry Rothman (Radio Swan) on turntables and effects.

I liken Thank God For Science to artists like Elvis Costello and David Bowie — musicians whose choices may puzzle you at first but reveal their brilliance over time. On early listens, I wondered why Costello or Bowie (and Thank God For Science, for that matter) made certain sonic decisions, thinking smoother or more conventional choices/lyrics might “work” better. But with each replay, I found clarity — realizing they knew exactly what they were doing all along, finding that maybe they knew better than I all along. Who would have known? 

And what a pleasure that is — a pleasure you can find in novels, music, or any art — when the creator is smarter than you, and you can just let go, trusting them to take you on a ride because you trust their intellect and skill. What a rare and amazing thing. Thank God For Science has such skill.

To me, Thank God For Science has a rare ability to capture pure aesthetic. Their music doesn’t just sound good; it feels creative. A passion of mine is writing fiction, and music often sparks ideas when I’m crafting a story. And while listening to tracks like “I-O-Moon Blues,” I found my imagination firing off vivid, fantastical visions — worlds as genre-blending as the songs themselves: sci-fi westerns, grungy/folky cyberpunk ballads. I haven’t felt that kind of inspiration since the show Cowboy Bebop, the glorious anime mash-up of science fiction, westerns, noir, and a whole lotta jazz.

So many of Thank God For Science’s songs stand out, but a few deserve special mention. “Oldsmobuick” is a transcendent, prog-rock epic reminiscent of early Genesis. Their 2018 live album Live captures the energy of an experimental future jazz club — just listen to “Stop Sign.” “Once I Lifted You” carries a haunting, 90s-style grunginess that instantly recalls Massive Attack — a helluva compliment if you ask me.

Their latest single, “Hands on America,” is perhaps their most accessible release yet, but it still fuses western, folk, 90s, xylophone whimsy, and arthouse cool. It’s a farmy, jazz-tinged track with a drugged-out prog-rock vibe. I love it.

The standout for me, though, is “Jasper” — a somber, hypnotic piece that showcases Thank God For Science’s gift for pairing unconventional sounds. It blends ranch-style twang, 60s-style organ, and what I think is a violin or cello that sounds straight out of The Witcher 3 soundtrack (inspired by Polish folk metal band Percival). I couldn’t stop smiling, my jaw on the floor.

Despite their serious artistry, Thank God For Science never loses its sense of humor or seems to take itself too seriously. Their tongue-in-cheek track titles — “Ahoy Palloi!” and “Hookline and Sink Her” — add to the band’s charm and remind you they’re having fun, too.

I haven’t heard anything this sonically fresh and out-there since I first listened to Jet Age of Tomorrow’s tongue-in-cheek yet surprisingly deep album, God’s Poop or Clouds? In other reviews of TGFS, one word kept popping up: weird. And yes — they are a weird band. But what better praise could I give? In a world obsessed with sameness, they stand out as something truly original.

They’re fresh. They’re exciting. And every listen reveals something new. I’ll say it again: thank God for Thank God For Science.

After paving a distorted pathway in the early ’90s with three albums on Sub Pop Records, the band Earth — bearing a name chosen in homage to Black Sabbath’s original moniker — marked their emergence from an extended period of recovery with the 2005 release of Hex; Or Printing the Infernal Method. The album saw Earth join Boris, Saint Vitus, and Sunn O))) as experimental, doom-laden labelmates on Southern Lord, with their droning metal crediting the grittiness of Merle Haggard, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Ennio Morricone’s film scores, including The Battle of Algiers, Cinema Paradiso, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Twenty years later, on November 5, 2025, Earth returned to form in Rhode Island for the first time in a decade with a sold-out performance of Hex in its entirety at Machines with Magnets (400 Main St., Pawtucket). But for all who anticipated a concert, first a physics lecture broke out. 

Having contributed piano, organ, trombone, and tubular bells to earlier Earth recordings, Steve Moore — who records solo as Stebmo — took the floor with his Wurlitzer electric piano and handheld Casio SK-1 portable synthesizer to open the night with renditions of jazz legends, Alice Coltrane, her husband John Coltrane, and Bobby Hutcherson. Between his own “Art Forms” and “Happy Ending,” Moore’s performance of the avant-garde detoured into discourse.

“Our hearts beat around one or two beats per second, sometimes slower than that if you’re very good at relaxing,” Moore explained, using the heart rate as a familiar point of orientation before expanding into the mathematics that explain musical frequencies. “This is where most of the music that exists in the world is sitting, right around this tempo, right around this rhythm.”

Moving to the mind, Moore mused over how electroencephalograms, or EEGs, reveal resonant oscillations, or brainwaves, that measure across a wider range of speeds than the heart. With their higher end roughly equating to where the pitch of sound begins, or a “very, very low note,” he compared such oscillations with the point at which a series of single photographs become an animation. Moore turned to his trombone to demonstrate the phenomenon of energy being contained in any instrument, making it a resonant physical body capable of altering others.

Similar to how people believe they “see” light, when in reality they apprehend the reflection of light off something else, Moore placed the properties of music in a category between the mystical and the mathematical. Tracing the harmonic series, or natural modes, as resonant with the biological division of cells and the long-standing logic of Moore’s Law, a principle established in 1965 by engineer Gordon Moore (no relation), that led to decades of computing advances, Moore spoke to the power held within the powers of two as a bridge toward beauty and wonder. 

Within the oscillations that create musical notes, he argued, are the underpinnings of human empathy, echoed in the head and the heart alike, and an ability through those notes to see oneself and experience an “otherness” in tandem, allowing for music as a universal language.

Invisible to the eye, but auditorially experienced, Moore’s introductions to the physics of sound seemed to be in service of establishing an anticipatory logic for appreciating the force of Earth. 

Earth set up in silence, allowing for Moore’s antecedent monologue to speak its own volumes before embarking upon their 80-minute foray through Hex, from “Mirage” through to “Tethered to the Polestar.” The overhead rotation of a disco ball in the shape of a skull reflected a scatter of light flickering over a red pall cast onto blank walls as the instrumental repetitions, digressions, and returns of Earth set a slow, steady pulse with the night passing through an unspoken peace. 

Before concluding, Earth introduced a new track, “Scalphunter’s Blues,” with the promise of a tenth studio album on the horizon — to be recorded in March 2026 with a planned release date in October. Whether inspired or confounded by the underlying physics at play, as the amps were turned off and the lights came on, the audience of 200 left the venue with a new paradigm for understanding the oscillations of Earth, their reverberations and echoes sensed even if unseen.