Thrice‘s The Artist In The Ambulance was released ten years ago this past June, and PropertyOfZack is launching our next Decade feature in honor of the album today. We have commentary on the album from bassist Ed Breckenridge, guitarist Teppei Taranishi, and POZ team members Adrienne Fisher, Jesse Richman, and Donald Wagenblast. Enjoy and reblog to let us know your thoughts on The Artist In The Ambulance ten years later!

How The Artist in the Ambulance holds up in 2013

I don’t think I really listen to, or write anything similar to AITA nowadays, but I think our intentions were in the right place and I would definitely say that holds up to me presently and always. By intentions I mean that we wanted to push oursleves, experiment, and build songs that we though had a unique place in the world. Not everyone would agree with me on this, but I think that music like any art has it’s basic likable elements, but really makes a piece of music, or art, or whatever, special is the elements of it that make it unique. Hopefully we did that. I don’t know if I’d say it was a great work, but it was definitely unique. heh. - Ed Breckenridge

It’s hard not to hear TAITA today and not hear 2003; stylistically, Thrice were at the forefront of a movement that came with its own date stamp, and Brian McTernan’s production bears all the hallmarks of that era. Still, as one of that year’s best albums, it remains a worthy listen despite the dated feel. Though the band seemed to sour on TAITA’s production in later years, that owes itself more to the band’s growing inclination toward more organic sounds over time than to any particular flaws in the recording. TAITA is tweaked to mistake-free, near-inhuman perfection, but that precision timing and the laser-focused instrumentation only serve to push the album into a sort of locked-in sonic overdrive — for an album that split the difference between pop-punk and post-hardcore, it hits incredibly heavily.

As for its songs, they ride atop Dustin Kensrue’s tremendously malleable vocals — as adept at bombastic keening as at throat-shredding growls — and his searching, probative lyrics, two things that never date. The album’s compositions are taut and tightly crafted, swinging between poles but incredibly hooky through and through. Though Thrice seemed to quickly phase the album’s highest-charting track, “All That’s Left,” out of their live set, singles “Stare At The Sun” and “The Artist In The Ambulance” (not to mention less-commercial bruisers like “Silhouette” and “Paper Tigers”) remained concert staples right up until the band’s 2012 hiatus, and for good reason. In terms of pure craft, TAITA ranks among the era’s best. – Jesse Richman

I’m not sure…I suppose it sounds pretty 2003. It’s impossible for me to have any perspective. — Teppei Taranishi

Most important track on The Artist in the Ambulance

Thrice has never masked the fact that their songs are rooted heavily in spiritual inspiration - they just did their best work to surround their soulful lyrics with metallic riffage and heavy rhythms. Yet the title track from this dime’s lineup is one of the friendliest-sounding things Thrice had ever done up to that point. The highly memorable delivery of “Late night, brakes lock, hear the tires squeal” cascades into a song laden with metaphor and good ole’ Teppei doing what he does best: grinding away on his guitar up and down the musical scale with hypnotizing fury.

The subject matter of the song, however, is why “The Artist in the Ambulance” wins the title for Most Important Jam. The accident scene described in the lyrics comes in first person from the victim’s haunting point-of-view and is easily the most poignant story on the entire record. Told succinctly, it manages to develop an unforgettable moment in Thrice’s career, starring a standout melody and a narrative that turns toward bigger life questions that are raised by the fading accident victim and ultimately seen as themes that Dustin Kensrue sprinkled through the rest of the record. Not to mention that it has the luxury of writing itself into history as the story behind the record title itself: predisposed for importance. - Adrienne Ray Fisher

Was the band successful in following up The Artist in the Ambulance?

The Artist in the Ambulance was released during the much-reminisced and romanticized “golden age” of our scene, colliding its success with other big genre imprints being put out by the likes of Thursday or Story of the Year (and dozens others). Needless to say, it came out at a time where it felt easy to love music made by your favorite band’s neighbor or a record that you picked up because you saw a video on Fuse (if you were fortunate enough to have Fuse back then, you lucky bastards).

Ambulance was the record that won Thrice their most accelerated path of success; their follow up, Vheissu, was more of a plateau in their career and wound up weeding out fairweather fans while solidifying themselves as a longstanding favorite for others. Moving further into the “post” part of “post-hardcore,” the adolescent brashness that waned more and more with each of Thrice’s releases is absent on Vheissu:the album digs deeper into expressing its introspection both sonically and lyrically, as opposed to just lyrically. For those Thrice fans who found and enjoyed the band during the Perfect Storm of the Scene, Vheissu may not have been the follow-up they were looking for, but in terms of songwriting maturation and the continued development of ideas, the fourth full-length is cemented in Thrice’s history as an evenly placed and natural stepping-stone up from the wiry success of The Artist in the Ambulance. - Adrienne Ray Fisher

Legacy of The Artist in the Ambulance

This is a hard one to answer because I think each of us might have a bit of a different perspective on it. From our perspective, where the utmost importance is the creative process, the story the record tells, and how well the music represents: mind to instrument to recording, I’d say that this record was challenging and our best work up to that point, but, we all felt that there were some hefty missing pieces. This was only an issue because of time, and pressure to release music before scheduled tours and deadlines. That being said, I don’t think there’s a single record we’ve done where we felt like we’d done it perfectly. There are always missing pieces, and I’d hope there always would be. I think AITA was one of many turning points for us, and a huge learning experience. The support we received touring on this record was unbelievably amazing and we are forever grateful for such amazing times. - Ed Breckenridge

It’s difficult to pinpoint the legacy of The Artist in the Ambulance, or any other Thrice album, for that matter. They were a one-of-a-kind band that progressed and evolved with each release, and did so with elegance and talent that were unparalleled in the scene. So how does Artist stack up against the rest of the albums that serve as snapshots of the band’s progression? Though there were plenty more albums before and after, The Artist in the Ambulance holds a great deal of significance in the course of the band’s career. The album was the band’s major-label debut (released by Island Records), and first album to place in the Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart, reaching a peak position of #16. The band’s hardcore influences continued to shine through on tracks like “Silhouette,” but showed a flair for arena-rock anthems with “Stare at the Sun,” “All That’s Left,” and the album’s title track. Though the band’s sound swayed and changed throughout their career, the band still kept a special place for tracks from Artist in their setlists, a sign of appreciation for the album, and a testament to its timelessness. - Donald Wagenblast

To be quite candid, it’s sort of the “almost” record for us. We learned a lot of lessons from writing and recording this record. We had a lot of great and inspired ideas but blocked ourselves in as far as writing/recording time since we started booking tours before we even finished writing. I think that led to some premature ideas that had great potential but never quite blossomed the way it should have. I truly believe that we had something a lot more progressive and interesting cooking. Since then, we’d kept everything completely open-ended while we were writing/recording, being sure to allow whatever time we needed to get everything right.

I know we’ve expressed this a number of times in the past, but in retrospect, the record sounds very stale to me. We recorded the drums in the big room at the now defunct Bearsville Studios, and that room was huge, with a beautifully lively sound to it. Our rough mixes sounded amazing. We made the mistake of going with a big name mixer who more or less ran it through his cookie cutter formula which sucked out all the character we saw in it. It worked OK for some of the songs, but there’s definitely a good handful of songs that got lost in translation. Again, lesson learned.

That’s not to say I hate the record at all. I appreciate it for its place in our band’s timeline and actually don’t have any regrets. I think it was a needed catalyst for a big turning point for us. -Teppei Taranishi

How The Artist in the Ambulance changed Thrice’s future

AITA changed the course of our lives and the bands future in a myriad of ways. We were in a spot where overwhelmed, but incredibly inspired. I would have to include that not just the album, but the process and inspiration leading up to the recording was hugely important to the projection and direction of our bands future. We’d been touring with amazing bands and ingesting all types of influences and ideas. This was so much the case that we had a really hard time trying to incorporate all the demos, concepts and ideas into one record. Also there was the new (major) label that helped us get our music to many more ears and eyes. It was stressful but great times. I think we really did things right, and didn’t lose our focus on the music, which maybe can be the case if you those opportunities and have lots of people telling you how they think you should do you. Thrice was constructively stubborn. - Ed Breckenridge

The commercial success of The Artist In The Ambulance bought the band some leeway to stretch their wings creatively. While follow-up Vheissu featured songs like “Image Of The Invisible” and “Of Dust And Nations,” which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on their prior albums, it often pushed up against the boundaries that defined the band: the unpredictably tortuous “The Earth Will Shake,” the crushing, surging “Hold Fast Hope,” and the quiet saudade of “Atlantic” all hinted at new creative directions that the band would pursue more fully on 2007-8’s four-part suite The Alchemy Index.

Fortunately, TAITA also won the band a fan base that would prove to be unusually loyal, following with them despite the stylistic departures to come. Between their future albums’ less commercial leanings, shrinking label support and the inevitable changes in popular tastes that come with time, TAITA was not just the first but also the last time Thrice was in a position to attract large numbers of new listeners, but those listeners they gained in that era have stayed committed for the long haul.

Most of Thrice’s die-hard fans would agree that, when the band folded their tents in 2012, they were only just reaching their peak – it’s their later albums that are most beloved by their staunchest supporters. But without TAITA, Thrice surely would have never gotten to that point. – Jesse Richman

It changed our future in a lot of ways I suppose, though it’s hard to delineate exactly. It was our first record since signing with Island and we definitely received the biggest mainstream push we’ve ever had. It was our first experience with bigger budgets—recording, music video, promo, etc. The label gave us their usual pampering of fancy dinners and nice hotels in NYC. Everything was new and exciting, but also overwhelming at the same time. I’m pretty sure it’s still our best selling record, and maybe best charting? I see it as the slice in the Thrice timeline of major label-dom—it was fun for a bit and I’m glad to have experienced it, but I’m also thankful that we weren’t in that world for long. It was never really our element. - Teppei Taranishi