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[PRE-PUNK] In an attic somewhere, there's a cache of photos of me in high school, all zitty and blue-haired, playing Hacky Sack in saggy JNCO jeans. Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster were a few years out of their teens when their Hutch and Kathy album first found daylight in 2000, but I bet listening back on it is, at times, a similarly cringe-inducing experience. It's a document of the duo's learning curve, and the songs tend to get overly repetitive or uncomfortably twee—and Harris is still shaking a cartoonish SoCal accent. Still, there's something startlingly original about these quaint home recordings that hints at the Thermals' lo-fi masterpieces to come: tight, minimal song structures; chemistry oozing through the duo's vocal harmonies; lyricism mixing the darkly comic and the sweet. "On the Way to Work" is a terribly infectious diddy about the mundanity of the work week. "An Infinite Loop" is a ramshackle road-trip jam, and you can hear the sound of the room in the guitar solo. Hell, you can hear the room everywhere on Hutch and Kathy—the room, the camaraderie, the sense of discovery, and the future of Portland music in the midst of an awkward growth spurt.
WWeek 2015