Knowing when to stop is a much-undervalued attribute, particularly in the music industry. So rare is the artist who calls it a day – and doesn’t renege on the decision – they are exceptions that prove the rule. Syd Barrett, Mark Hollis, Meg White… Even rarer is knowing how to stop – David Bowie of course set the benchmark for career-concluding swan songs with 2016’s Blackstar. But fellow New York resident JG Thirlwell has made a similar creative choice with the release of Halt, his tenth album under the Foetus nom de plume – satellite, remix and live releases notwithstanding. The record brings to a close a project that spans 45 years of exceptional creativity, and at times controversy.
There’s an apocryphal story about Thirlwell that states when his former manager was shopping him around to majors in the mid-80s, all the labels had an issue with the name – which at the time was You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath. When asked if he’d mind changing it, Thirlwell was compliant. He would henceforth be known as Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel.
Whether true or not, it’s telling on several levels. Firstly, it shows what a wag Thirlwell could be – the humour in his work is often overlooked. It also shows that existing on the margins was where he felt he belonged; that mass consumption would by its very definition compromise his vision. But it also showed that Thirlwell understood, even then, that to have his work presented the way he wanted, he had to be in the driving seat. This desire for control may have limited his commercial opportunities, but it also meant that he would make decisions that were the best for him, and his art. Including when it was finished.
To clarify, Thirlwell isn’t walking away from music completely; no, his career as a composer-for-hire will continue, as will his various other musical outlets such as Xordox, Manorexia and Silver Mantis. But the Foetus project, which began in 1981 with the scratchy 7” ‘Spite Your Face/OKFM’, is done. It has covered a lot of ground in the past four and half decades: post-punk, noise rock, musique concrète, classical, disco, industrial metal, big band, exotica, minimalism, ethnographical, and opera. Each release would refine what had gone before, and add to it, incorporating whatever technology or new sounds Thirlwell was currently obsessing over. Always a vehicle to express anxiety and frustration, earlier Foetus manifestations were inspired by punk and Dada and would be deliberately abrasive in the pursuit of questioning social mores. Lyrically, Thirlwell used Foetus as armour, allowing him to lob rocks at whoever and whatever he liked, adopting characters to push boundaries – often taking a stance in opposition to what he actually felt and thought, sometimes to his detriment.
But – like so many before and since – the personas he created almost consumed him, and he skirted dangerously close to becoming the thing he’d set out to parody. By the time of 2001’s Flow Thirlwell had tired of what he’d become, and it would be four long years – in which time he learnt to score music and became a composer of some merit – before he was comfortable to take on the Foetus mantle once more. The resulting album, the lightly psychedelic Love (2004), saw the Foetus project redrawn in Thirlwell’s new sober image, more open and personal than ever before. His success as a composer – at one point scoring both Adult Swim’s The Venture Bros. and FX’s Archer concurrently – meant Foetus releases became erratic, and it’s been 14 years since the last, Hide (2011). The decision to bring his Foetus work to a close, reflects not just an awareness of his own mortality, but also of legacy. Not for Thirlwell the plundering of old hard drives for unfinished works and sketches after his demise – rather the Foetus catalogue has a very definite end, and that end is Halt.
As with the previous nine albums, Halt is both a culmination of all his musical fascinations as well as reflection of his current ones. Each previous iteration of Foetus is present and correct, but so too is a new mode, a queasy folk that is deployed to underpin songs that take aim at the current state of US politics. Because make no mistake, this is the most political album – Foetus or otherwise – that Thirlwell has been involved in.
Created over a period that spans both Trump presidencies as well as the pandemic, Thirlwell hasn’t had to look far for fuel for his ire. Dread is a leitmotif throughout the Foetus catalogue and Halt is no exception, with themes of war, religion, disease, global warming, hypocrisy, conspiracy, and death, Thirlwell has no trouble maintaining the intensity that his Foetus work is known for.
As opener ‘Succulence’ cranks up, the first thing you notice is the voice. It’s the same one that croaked out of our TV screens when Thirlwell made his UK television debut on The Tube in 1983, and one he hasn’t used since Flow. “I had a good home, but I left…” he growls before Yeah Yeah Yeah’s drummer Brian Chase crashes in as part of an orchestral wall of sound. Though still a one-man show, Thirlwell has the cream of New York’s various music scenes at his disposal, and they all embroider Halt’s immense sound with detail.
On ‘Scurvy’ The Rhythm Method’s Leah Asher adds violin over Thirlwell’s plaintive vocal, his new-found interest in traditional musics a vessel to layout the horror of living in New York during the pandemic. “I could not look the other way, fifteen children died today” he sings as Asher’s violin soars and swoops, the restraint channelling anger just as effectively as bludgeon.
But if it’s a beating you want, then ‘Bang’ and ‘Rabbit Hole’ bring the brutal. Bolstered by the avant guitar mangling of Dither’s Brendon Randall Myers and Timo Ellis of Netherlands, both songs hark back to the late ‘80s machine-tooled live iteration of Foetus. Again, Thirlwell’s vocals are vital and alive, the result of using a handheld mic in the studio, capturing a performance rather than simply recording a voice.
‘The World is Broken’ is the latest example of Thirlwell’s take on the prison work song – a vehicle that allowed inmates to complain about their lot in plain sight of their incarcerators. Thirlwell makes it abundantly clear that we are not in a good place, the song building to the hugest of riffs, while jazz singer Sami Stevens’ wail takes no prisoners.
The blast of brass that opens ‘Harpoon’ summons Melville’s leviathan, with Foetus as Ahab at the bow of the Pequod, blade ready to puncture whatever great beast rises from the depths. Throughout Halt, Thirlwell’s production and sound design is impeccable, heavy and dramatic, showing his mastery of the mix, a talent honed over years working at the bleeding edge of studio technology.
There’s a spy-film soundtrack feel to ‘Dead to Me’, the brass making it decidedly John Barryesque, while the densely layered ‘Polar Vortex’ opens with delicate restraint – Thirwell again musing on the current end days – before collapsing into pit of industrial noise and discordant orchestration.
‘Crater’ returns to Hide’s operatic aspirations, with Laura Wolf’s vocals skipping over the frantic backing, while ‘Warships’ again utilises American roots music for Thirlwell to state unequivocally his political stance: “The crucifixes look like iron crosses, I will push back hard against them ‘till I die.”
And so, to ‘Many Versions of Me’, the final song on the final Foetus album. Rather than go out in a hail of bullets, Thirlwell instead brings the curtain down with an elegiac ballad, looking back over the last 45 years. It’s a real heartbreaker from a (former) ballbreaker and as Asher’s violin lifts the finale, Thirlwell digs back into the Foetus oeuvre and quotes lines from songs past, giving a sense of a circle finally being closed.
What makes Halt such an effective closing statement is precisely this sense of completeness. It weaves the various strands of Thirlwell’s work into something that feels both summative and forward-looking, even as it announces its own finality. The end of the Foetus project has been on Thirlwell’s own terms – controlled, deliberate, and uncompromising to the last. He’s avoided his career dribbling away like so many others, or to not have a satisfying conclusion. And now that we can see the whole body of work – the shape of it – it’s impossible not to look at it as a living diary, a catalogue of obsessions, musical and otherwise. It’s a reflection of Thirlwell as a writer, creator, composer, and also as a human being. From pre-boy to man – Foetus has left the building.
