Thornley Albums (2)
What The Critics Say
After Big Wreck dried up in 2002, Ian Thornley returned to his native Toronto, where he hooked up with pal Chad Kroeger of incredibly huge blather rock outfit Nickelback. Thornley signed with Kroeger's vanity imprint, tapped producer Gavin Brown, and secured backing help from the studio musician ranks. The result is Come Again, a slick, straightforward post-grunge effort with an ear for melody and slight twinges of psychedelia. Cuts like "Falling to Pieces" and the title track are greased-up chest bumps of well-executed 21st century active rock, akin to types like Lo-Pro or the similarly Gavin-produced Three Days Grace. It rumbles appropriately and teems with generic yearn -- it's numbingly indistinct music, but damn if it doesn't sound good loud. Thornley makes a more lasting impression with material like "So Far So Good" and "The Going Rate (My Fix)," which lets him stretch his wily vocals over instrumentation that shifts from acoustic to electric, and from plaintive to powerful. Contrasting the muscular stomp of "Easy Comes" with the more atmospheric, melodic "All Comes Out in the Wash," Audioslave becomes Thornley's closest stylistic peer. They both showcase powerful singers with whisper-to-a-screech range; both groups are a bit older and like tempering their full-on rock rip with some gray-hairs-in-the-sink introspection. Come Again should find fans of this sound, as well as Thornley supporters left over from his Big Wreck days. ~ Johnny Loftus, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
The five-year gap between Thornley's albums was alarming, and the opening track does little to dispel the worries: sure, the man roars, and his guitar does the same, but the melody is too sappy, and the arrangements cluttered: seriously, a children choir? Eyebrows may be raised. Thankfully, there are no other traces of sophomore slump on the album, which, after all, contains many songs written around the time of Thornley's powerful debut Come Again. Tiny Pictures rips through a set of rock tunes loaded with everything Thornley does well -- simple and bright acoustic melodies, quick buildups to huge riffs that were invented in the '70s but weren't nuke-powered back then, and, of course, the ever-impressive singing. The music is still similar to Audioslave in terms of mood and sheer rock foundation, but it's also clear that the similarities between Thornley and Nickelback don't end with those Canadian passports: in fact, Chad Kroeger co-wrote "Your Song," although it's not the best cut on the disc. Nickelback appear to be busy preparing the ground for Kroeger to take "predictability" as his legal middle name, and some of this seems to rub off on Thornley, who underplays his strength as a rocker in favor of some tame acoustic strumming. But Thornley is at his best when he's all-out and loud, and he probably wouldn't be able to suppress it even if he tried, and so the album sports a satisfying number of straightforward post-grunge cuts, sometimes catchy as hell ("Man Overboard"); some of the lighter cuts work well, too, such as the country-tinged "This Is Where My Heart Is." All in all, Thornley may have failed in his self-professed goal of creating an album that would reveal new layers of sound on each spin, but he did what he really had to: produced a gripping heavy rock record that doesn't wear thin on the first two listens. ~ Alexey Eremenko, All Music Guide
