One of the most inventive and prolific songwriters of recent decades, Michigan’s Fred Thomas has made a name for himself across genres and under a variety of guises, fronting bands and running record labels, and all the while retaining his own singular voice. Last month saw Antiquated Future Records release Another Song About Riding the Bus (Selected Songs 2002-2020), a compilation of his lesser known B-sides and rarities that aims to fill the gaps between official releases. What results is a record that can both cap the collection for completionists and introduce the uninitiated to the world of Fred Thomas.
The collection includes songs from a variety of Thomas’s projects. Saturday Looks Good to Me, City Center, Failed Flowers and Idle Ray are all represented, as well the impressive Fred Thomas solo oeuvre. And in combining proper recordings with radio sessions, it portrays both ends of the spectrum. Detailed electronic soundscapes and lush retro pop tones sit alongside the jagged, imperfect urgency of live performances.
The release also gives a picture of how his work fits into the indie landscape that developed alongside him, a view that shows just how versatile Fred Thomas has been. There’s something of early Emperor X in the scrappy, urgency of ‘Cookies’, a clear link to the sincere alt-folk of Nana Grizol and co. in ‘Susceptible to Ghosts’, while the lo-fi pop electronics of ‘It Sounds Like They’re In Love With You’ sits adjacent to the work of Stephen Merritt. The folk-inflected ‘Summer of OMD’ owes as much to emo as acoustic, the playful ‘Can’t Ever Sleep’ a close cousin of Owen Ashworth‘s Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, but what is most striking is how he cycles through these genres without ever losing his own individuality. Fred Thomas has no clear position within the web of indie music, and makes no promises beyond the fact that his work could not be by anyone else. The songs might sound wildly different, but they all sound exactly like Fred Thomas.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=150392526 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=3820622990]
Another Song About Riding the Bus is out now via Antiquated Future and you can get it from Bandcamp. The release is the first in Antiquated Future’s Selected Songs series, created in collaboration with Two Plum Press, which will see these back catalogue deep-dives curated on golden ticket cassette tapes and packaged in letterpress and offset-print boxes and accompanied with a risograph-printed booklet of liner notes and essays.
