Thousandaire – Cowards

The Ghost Is Clear

The American South is responsible for some of history’s greatest riff-rock, whether you’re talkin’ Texas’ trailblazing trio ZZ Top, NOLA’s heavyweight champions Crowbar, or Florida’s sludge-pop pioneers Torche. Down in the old red hills of Atlanta lies a trio called Thousandaire, a fuzzy guitar group celebrating ten years as a band with their third album, Cowards.

Despite this being their newest release, these six songs date back to the band’s earliest days, reworked and souped-up to sock you through the speakers. The opener “In The Shade” features thickly distorted guitars at the forefront, with the rhythm section exploding along behind. Thousandaire make exactly my type of music, at the cross-section of shoegaze, slowcore, and sludge metal, much like their Birmingham, Alabama contemporaries Null, and this first track is the perfect hook.

“Treehouse” is more of a straight rocker, falling more in line with a Superheaven sound that focuses as much on the melody as it does the heaviness, while “Preening” is rooted in a difficult, dissonant riff that accentuates its darkness. The album’s almost-eponymous track “Coward” is the longest at seven minutes, but uses its patience to justify its length, generating addictive tension between the quieter moments and the louder ones.

The album’s Bandcamp description plainly states “The songs that very clearly aren’t ours, aren’t,” although they are not specifically credited. These would be the final two tracks, “Friendly Fire,” a Jawbreaker b-side from Dear You later included on the Etc. compilation, and “Tom” by Codeine from the landmark album The White Birch. Both bands were extremely transformative for me as a teenager, and hearing Thousandaire take them on for this record aligns their indie rock placement even more closely with my interests. Cowards is a slow, heavy, and concise release that amplifies emotional rock past its limitations and echoes through the South to wherever you need it.