Thick As Thieves

Thick As Thieves

By Miriam Lamey
Photo by Patrick Piasecki

It’s pretty much understood that no two people will ever see the world in precisely the same way. In a collaborative setting, however, differences in band members’ backgrounds can be cause for exciting musical interactions. Take Boston-based Thick As Thieves, for example, who blend together their literary leanings and varied musical backgrounds into an enlightening indie rock concoction.

Singer and guitarist Tyler Littwin majored in English at Colgate University, and draws on his passion for literature when writing songs. Not coincidentally, the band takes its name from a William Blake manuscript. “There’s lots of symbolist stuff, in the vein of TS Eliot, that I draw on.” Littwin continues, “In songs, you don’t have a long time to tell a full story in a typical sort of narrative fashion; you have to be throwing words and phrases in there that kind of resonate with people.” Combined with light, acoustic guitars, mournful vocals and strong bass and drums, Littwin’s vocals comprise a strong focal point to the band’s sound, always mixed clearly so the listener can discern the lyrics.

Littwin cites Irvine Welch, the Scottish author of Trainspotting and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. The band doesn’t call themselves anglophiles, but British and Scottish influences are ubiquitous in Thick as Thieves’ music. When writing lyrics for their latest album, We Planted Driftwood And Nothing Changed, Littwin admits that he was inspired by Welch’s writing style and ideas. Lyrically and thematically, the album ponders “going out to one area, seeing the same people, and [Welch’s] books deal with a lot of that, the same characters,” Littwin explains, “I’m sure that it influenced the lyrics directly.”

Littwin hails from the East Coast, while bassist Aaron Benson and drummer Mike Cotter are both originally from the Midwest. Benson, from Travers City, Michigan, says, “the area I’m from is a really artistic area. I was focused on a lot of the British sounding music; obviously the Beatles, but Radiohead was a huge, huge influence. Muse, more of that guitar-driven type stuff.” In complete contrast, Cotter was raised in a small town in Illinios. Yet Cotter was involved with marching band, jazz band and concert band, which shaped his drum playing. He feels his style is “more of a percussive art, not just playing the kit.” Cotter continues, “I hear a tune, I usually listen to it really, really closely and base my drum part not just off what genre I’m playing, but off everybody else who is playing, which is what you do when you listen to a lot of classical music.”

Each member in Thick As Thieves comes from complimentary, although highly different musical backgrounds. It seems that this should make for creative problems and jagged practices, but Benson feels that the band is adept at bringing their ideas together in a cohesive fashion. “We all write,” Benson says. “Mike will come out with the drum kit and Tyler will start playing guitar over it. I’ll come up with something myself, and get to the point where I’m not getting any more ideas and I’ll bring it to the group.” He remarks, “By the time we get through the first verse it’s already changed. Almost always the songs start off as something completely different; there are songs that started off as ballads that turned into dance songs and vice versa.”

www.musicforthieves.com

(http://performermag.com/nep.spot03.0712.php) - Northeast Performer (performermag.com)

Thick as Thieves

Thick as Thieves
Not long after the release of Sawyer’s Signals/Sounds, the Boston group was forced to take a change of direction following the departure of their lead singer and keyboardist. The remaining members – Aaron Benson (guitars/backing vocals), Tyler Littwin (lead vocals/guitar), Todd Dahlhoff (bass/backing vocals), and Mike Cotter (drums) – emerged as Thick as Thieves and now, one year after Sawyer’s demise, Thieves has a six-song disc to share their work as a quartet.

The self-titled EP is clearly the work of a skilled band, but it takes a minute before Thick as Thieves delivers the goods. Introductory track "Overshore", with its incredibly dreamy (i.e. new age-y) feel and distant, washed out spoken vocal segment lacks cohesion with the remaining five tracks and comes off as a bit self-indulgent. The remaining songs demonstrate focused songwriting capable of packing a plethora of ideas.

Although an average track length under four minutes isn’t usually the mark of what would be described as epic, these compositions are certainly worthy of the label. The group seamlessly transitions between numerous musical themes creating dynamic soundscapes and an engrossing musical experience sure to make listeners thankful that the quartet chose to form Thick as Thieves following the dissolution of Sawyer. - www.thephiller.com

"Thick As Thieves took the stage next, looking fairly confident as they set up their instruments. Tyler Littwin's vocal melodies were the band's greatest asset, weaving infectious hooks throughout tightly performed, often folk-based noise rock. While Thick As Thieves performed dynamically and had decent stage presence, the band's songwriting was most impressive. Often adventurous in structure, the core arrangements seemed wholly organic, as though they were initially written on an acoustic guitar and arranged for live rock later on. One highlight of the set was "Here's To Waking Up," featuring a catchy chorus melody reminiscent of 1990s Brit pop." - Northeast Performer

"Thick As Thieves took the stage next, looking fairly confident as they set up their instruments. Tyler Littwin's vocal melodies were the band's greatest asset, weaving infectious hooks throughout tightly performed, often folk-based noise rock. While Thick As Thieves performed dynamically and had decent stage presence, the band's songwriting was most impressive. Often adventurous in structure, the core arrangements seemed wholly organic, as though they were initially written on an acoustic guitar and arranged for live rock later on. One highlight of the set was "Here's To Waking Up," featuring a catchy chorus melody reminiscent of 1990s Brit pop." - Northeast Performer

Heavy Rotation Record's Thick As Thieves is keeping rock and roll at the forefront while inklings of indie float in and out from behind the strings. The band was formed when guitarist Aaron Benson met with drummer Mike Cotter in Allston. After some initial setbacks the two started piecing together extended works in odd time signatures, and structural forms. After recording a rough demo, the duo met their now bassist, Matt Harmon and soon after called upon writer/poet Tyler Littwin to front the band even without any prior singing or playing experience. One William Blake reference and a few practice sessions later, Thick As Thieves was born.
It's hard to nail down a description of the band since they have such a wonderfully unique sound in today's world of monotony. Littwin's melodies and lyrics are catchy enough to stick, but avoid any threat of being generic bubblegum pop. Their music ranges and changes from Radiohead like ambience with sweet vocals floating on heavy reverb over slow picking guitars and synthesizers to upbeat pop rock numbers that rely on harmony and melody more than crunching guitars and solos.
Ambient guitar slides, arpeggios and slides drift through atmospheric sound scapes created by honed and able musicians that set the listener in a state of buoyancy in the Thieve's gently rippling orchestration that gradually progress with intensity before smashing in to the rock that waits below. Sometimes edging on Get Up Kids, or early Hot Rod Circuit, and at other times hints of Elliot Smith can be heard.
In the most generic of terms, Thick As Thieves can presently be described as Alternative Rock but with tracks that creep along and others that explode with high octane guitar riffs and screams, it will be very interesting to see in what direction the Thieves move from here. Pick up the Thieve's current album "We Planted Driftwood and Nothing Changed" at their show tonight (December 19th) at TT the Bears in Cambridge. For more information visit Thick As Thieves on myspace.com or musicforthieves.com.

Jack Edwards
Staff Writer
Feb 2007 - Berklee College of Music's The Groove

Thick As Thieves
We Planted Driftwood and Nothing Changed
2006

Daaaamn. This is really the kind of band that makes the Boston music scene so vibrant. Cambridge-based Thick As Thieves’ debut full-length is a joy from start to finish, full of bubbling creativity and a maturity rare in a band comprised of members in their early 20’s. Their sound manages to be both accessible and exploratory: it is guitar-based (but happy to use all sorts of keyboards for effects), with a vocalist who at times sounds like Billy Corgan with the sensitivity of Elliott Smith. The songwriting is remarkable as well; every riff is fluid and in perfect balance with the vocal melodies. There is an extremely high level of musical communication between the instruments, and the whole album feels more coherent than most major-label releases. Not many bands can vary their sound as effectively as from stellar rockers like “An Empire Sound” to delicate musical moments like “Telegraphs to Spitfire.” Plus, their lyrics are gorgeous and evocative.

-- Matt Aucoin - Avoidperil.com

From the Boston Phoenix review of the Heavy Rotation show at the BPC:

"But the evening's highlight was a set by Thick As Thieves, who recruited a second drummer and a string quartet to join them for two powerful, layered rock originals. For a while, real-world professionalism ruled"

http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid33558.aspx - The Boston Phoenix

Our FNX homies over in Lynn have a knack for rooting out great local talent, they’re even better at putting on awesome rock shows. Not very good at jogging, though. Not at all. This Friday, August 8, they’ve gathered five of Boston’s best rock bands for a spectacular blowout at the Middle East Downstairs—and if you don’t believe that “best bands” part, there’s empirical evidence to be had: Here’s a pre-program primer of the night’s lineup.......

(for the full article please visit: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/Music/65890-Bumpin-crop/)

Thick as Thieves, “I Heard a Pin Snap Loose"
While Thick as Thieves is locally regaled for their mega-adventurous guitar rock, “I Heard a Pin” is a gorgeous little acoustic number putting due emphasis on the sweet tones of Tyler Littwin’s vocal. It’s hard to fathom a prettier song coming out of Boston this year. Curveball aaaand strike!
- The Boston Phoenix

Thick as Thieves —
We Planted Driftwood
and Nothing Changed
Recorded and Mixed by Aaron Benson
Mastered by Jeff Lipton at Peerless Mastering


As far as album titles go, Thick as Thieves seems to be taking its cue from the Liars — both groups favor the vaguely disturbing sentence fragment. The similarity, however, ends there; there is a certain sense of modern alienation in the music of the two bands, but while the Liars have channeled that detachment into forward-facing avant-garde, Thick as Thieves returns to the source. Its sound, built on the simple template of solid rock music, pulls us back to a time before that ubiquitous alienation even existed.
Or so we think.
On the band’s debut, Thick as Thieves write songs that, for all their appealing hooks and smooth vocals, are filled with doubt and ambivalence. The band often plays with a tense, suspenseful softness, seemingly holding back while containing its sound within a limited frame. The strongest tracks on the disc are those that make the best use out of this quiet space: “Here’s to Waking Up,” with its understated riff and country twang, evokes with a few broad strokes all the fear and possibility of an empty day. The CD’s closing track, “...Or Other Testimony of Summer Nights,” using nothing more than a plucked guitar and a distant-sounding voice, creates the band’s most haunting song.
Thick as Thieves struggle when they are trying to play in a more dynamic register. Many of the disc’s more upbeat tracks, such as “Bright Keys” or “Commuter Lot” focus more on hooks than on mood, and in such moments the band loses that wistful quality that makes the stronger songs so appealing. This is a band that, on its debut, is still in the process of exploring its strengths and weaknesses. We Planted Driftwood and Nothing Changed allows us a peek into this process - a listening experience that is equal parts fascination and exasperation. Still, when Thick as Thieves is on, the sound is arresting. (Self-released)

www.musicforthieves.com

-Catherine Tung - Northeast Performer

Thick As Thieves: Writing Concept Songs In A Singles Age
By Christopher Brook
Photos by Derek Kouyoumjian

“Songs should be like any good piece of fiction,” says Tyler Littwin, singer/guitarist of Cambridge’s Thick As Thieves. “You should have ups and downs, moments of tension and moments of release.”

Literary metaphors aside, it’s still hard to shake the fact that the four of them are hunched over vanilla frappes and cheap fries instead of poetry anthologies and atlases.

By Sunday afternoon, Boston’s Pour House is buzzing. Taps of Harpoon IPA are flowing, college students filter in and out and NCAA basketball is broadcast across flat screen TVs. Within minutes, it seems like meeting Thick as Thieves over periodicals at the local public library would be more fruitful than hunkering down with them in a corner of restaurant.

Amid the hustle and bustle, Littwin orders a greasy burger and proceeds to discuss his band’s new record with the kind of rapt attention that’s usually reserved for authors.
This is because Littwin, who plays alongside Mike Cotter, drums, Kellen Kleinfelter, bass, and Aaron Benson, guitar, is keen on drawing parallels between music and books. Littwin and company, whose songs can be likened more to chapters in a book have explored this relationship as of late, crafting longer and more fleshed out songs for their new record. The band relished the opportunity to discuss how True Believers in the Long Walk Home, their second self-released long player, came to be.
True Believers..., the band’s follow-up to 2006’s We Planted Driftwood and Nothing Happened, seems expansive in every sense of the word. Culling songs from different stages of their four-year existence, the album, follows a loose concept translated through the band’s reinvigorated sound.

For a band that counts “misleading romantic literature” among their MySpace influences and boasts an English degree-toting singer, it seems apt that Thick As Thieves’ songs flirt with prose. Yet, writing a concept record poses a challenge. Often bands must balance both ambition and discretion when whittling down songs and choosing tracks, thus possibly overstuffing the album, a common malady faced in non-conceptual pieces as well.

It only seems fitting, though, that Thick as Thieves was forged through academics. Kleinfelter and Benson grew up together in Michigan. Benson later met Cotter at Berklee and the framework for Thick as Thieves was formed. The two toyed around with an experimental guitar and drum sound at first, producing an album called Telemakos Airlines. The two ultimately realized their songs called for a fuller band sound. Kleinfelter, who had wound up in Boston, busying himself with assorted bands and music of his own, was eventually recruited by his old friend to play bass. Littwin, recently graduated from Colgate University with a bachelor’s degree in English in hand, filled in for vocal duties soon after.

While concept records are intended to convey a more thematically united series of thoughts through music, there’s a difference between books and records. Novels are rarely sold by the chapter, whereas records, especially in the burgeoning age of iTunes, can be purchased individually, on a song-by-song basis.

Therein lies a problem. If a record, especially a concept record, is intended to be a fully realized idea, how can it be consumed without listening to its tracks beginning to end?
On iTunes, some copyright holders have even mandated their CD be purchased as a whole, forbidding the sale of individual tracks. It’s from this that a question mounts: how do you sell albums in a singles-based world?

Though the idea is heavy on their minds, Thick as Thieves refuse to believe that music should be taken too seriously. “We’re not going to go to that extent,” says Littwin laughing, “We’re pretentious assholes but we’re not going to be that extreme and not let people buy it.”
“I’d rather walk away with someone having our record paying nothing,” says Littwin, in line with such practices.

Even Nine Inch Nails, certainly no strangers to the concept record (2007’s Year Zero visuliazed dystopian future), did something similar in 2008. By releasing a collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV for free, NIN mastermind Trent Reznor allowed listeners to download the concept record and see the big picture, instead of restraining what they could listen to.

Concept albums do not always have to follow a central character’s plights and struggles however. Albums such as Radiohead’s OK Computer (dependence on unreliable technology) and even The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (the course of a blossoming to souring relationship) are concept albums but in a thematically exclusive fashion. Like these two landmark albums, True Believers... isn’t forcing the subject matter into a narrative structure (i.e. Tommy).

While any songwriter will claim their songs follow a certain theme if they’re written in the same span of time, t - Northeast Performer (performermag.com)

Thick As Thieves

True Believers In The Long Walk Home By Thick As Thieves (myspace.com/musicforthieves)

For every moment of hushed beauty here, like the gently plucked acoustics and heavy-hearted piano balladry of "Chemical Division," there's a counterbalancing blast of snarling, vampy rocking, countrified twang, or moody, electronic ambience. It's an impressively diverse sonic palate for the young Cambridge band, whose songs break and crest on waves of sudden momentum shifts. "Mars Vigila" is the highlight: a rhythmically complex burst of chiming, ethereal elegy and melting guitar delay broken up by breast-beating, shouted catharsis. Through it all they maintain a surprising sense of melodic focus for a group stitching so many ideas into such a tightly woven whole.

Boston Magazine - Boston Magazine

Thick As Thieves: Writing Concept Songs In A Singles Age
By Christopher Brook
Photos by Derek Kouyoumjian

“Songs should be like any good piece of fiction,” says Tyler Littwin, singer/guitarist of Cambridge’s Thick As Thieves. “You should have ups and downs, moments of tension and moments of release.”

Literary metaphors aside, it’s still hard to shake the fact that the four of them are hunched over vanilla frappes and cheap fries instead of poetry anthologies and atlases.

By Sunday afternoon, Boston’s Pour House is buzzing. Taps of Harpoon IPA are flowing, college students filter in and out and NCAA basketball is broadcast across flat screen TVs. Within minutes, it seems like meeting Thick as Thieves over periodicals at the local public library would be more fruitful than hunkering down with them in a corner of restaurant.

Amid the hustle and bustle, Littwin orders a greasy burger and proceeds to discuss his band’s new record with the kind of rapt attention that’s usually reserved for authors.
This is because Littwin, who plays alongside Mike Cotter, drums, Kellen Kleinfelter, bass, and Aaron Benson, guitar, is keen on drawing parallels between music and books. Littwin and company, whose songs can be likened more to chapters in a book have explored this relationship as of late, crafting longer and more fleshed out songs for their new record. The band relished the opportunity to discuss how True Believers in the Long Walk Home, their second self-released long player, came to be.
True Believers..., the band’s follow-up to 2006’s We Planted Driftwood and Nothing Happened, seems expansive in every sense of the word. Culling songs from different stages of their four-year existence, the album, follows a loose concept translated through the band’s reinvigorated sound.

For a band that counts “misleading romantic literature” among their MySpace influences and boasts an English degree-toting singer, it seems apt that Thick As Thieves’ songs flirt with prose. Yet, writing a concept record poses a challenge. Often bands must balance both ambition and discretion when whittling down songs and choosing tracks, thus possibly overstuffing the album, a common malady faced in non-conceptual pieces as well.

It only seems fitting, though, that Thick as Thieves was forged through academics. Kleinfelter and Benson grew up together in Michigan. Benson later met Cotter at Berklee and the framework for Thick as Thieves was formed. The two toyed around with an experimental guitar and drum sound at first, producing an album called Telemakos Airlines. The two ultimately realized their songs called for a fuller band sound. Kleinfelter, who had wound up in Boston, busying himself with assorted bands and music of his own, was eventually recruited by his old friend to play bass. Littwin, recently graduated from Colgate University with a bachelor’s degree in English in hand, filled in for vocal duties soon after.

While concept records are intended to convey a more thematically united series of thoughts through music, there’s a difference between books and records. Novels are rarely sold by the chapter, whereas records, especially in the burgeoning age of iTunes, can be purchased individually, on a song-by-song basis.

Therein lies a problem. If a record, especially a concept record, is intended to be a fully realized idea, how can it be consumed without listening to its tracks beginning to end?
On iTunes, some copyright holders have even mandated their CD be purchased as a whole, forbidding the sale of individual tracks. It’s from this that a question mounts: how do you sell albums in a singles-based world?

Though the idea is heavy on their minds, Thick as Thieves refuse to believe that music should be taken too seriously. “We’re not going to go to that extent,” says Littwin laughing, “We’re pretentious assholes but we’re not going to be that extreme and not let people buy it.”
“I’d rather walk away with someone having our record paying nothing,” says Littwin, in line with such practices.

Even Nine Inch Nails, certainly no strangers to the concept record (2007’s Year Zero visuliazed dystopian future), did something similar in 2008. By releasing a collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV for free, NIN mastermind Trent Reznor allowed listeners to download the concept record and see the big picture, instead of restraining what they could listen to.

Concept albums do not always have to follow a central character’s plights and struggles however. Albums such as Radiohead’s OK Computer (dependence on unreliable technology) and even The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (the course of a blossoming to souring relationship) are concept albums but in a thematically exclusive fashion. Like these two landmark albums, True Believers... isn’t forcing the subject matter into a narrative structure (i.e. Tommy).

While any songwriter will claim their songs follow a certain theme if they’re written in the same span of time, t - Northeast Performer (performermag.com)