Thalia Zedek Band - Fighting Season

The dust hasn’t even settled on E’s Negative Work, but Thalia Zedek is back with a stellar new solo album, aptly entitled, Fighting Season. Rather than Woody Guthrie’s “This Machine Kills Fascists” there’s a “FCK NZS” sticker on her guitar in the cover photo.

Things kick off gamely with Zedek crooning, “Don’t try to rescue me, you are not the one.” ‘Bend Again’ is an opener that is no nonsense musically yet vocally is fraught with inviting vulnerability. And such a paradox sums this album up. The words may try to push you away, but the music does its best to draw you in. The irresistible yearning of, ‘What I Wanted’ follows and is an album highlight.  

“You don’t have to have a reason, in the fighting season,” Zedek sings on the melodic yet confrontational title track. A nice subversive bit of irony to a sentiment that in less skillful hands could slip into to self-righteous sloganeering. Elsewhere, ‘Of The Unknown’ displays a sense of subtlety that is all too often lacking in today’s world of Pop Diva grandstanding. “Is it just the fear or is it real? Nobody will tell you what they really feel” Zedek opines.

‘Ladder’ manages to both burn close and soar to anthemic heights, while ‘War Is Won’ is a no-nonsense ballad that veers toward the world-weary with flashes of defiant soul searching. Elsewhere, ‘The Lines’ is solid Indie Rock fare setting up the beguilingly ambient ballad, ‘We Will Roll’. A song that could easily slip into indulgence but never does.  ‘The Tower’ provides quite a view and musically, is all melancholic peaks and ruminative valleys. A haunting send off to an album that doesn’t seek to take the world by storm, so much as reveal the storm within.