Sub Pop: it was the soundtrack to those murky evenings when it was OK to ‘feel’ your pain with the hordes of gangly long-hairs shambling around to ‘Touch Me I’m Sick!’ in your local, dull-as-dishwater indie joint. It was the collective that ultimately caused supa-model Kate Moss to leave chip-grease in her hair. It introduced stark-raving pseudo-revolutionaries Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt to your grandparents and has consistently puked up more different shades of badass muthafucka genius than any label ever in the history of man. So… The Thermals. High expectations? Ho-hum.

'More Parts Per Million' is the LP that, given the opportunity and a broken tape machine, a thousand shaky angst-torn college losers would love to make. Y’know the characters; the ever so quiet until they reach fifteen and then they discover black turtleneck jumpers and Superchunk type, the hangin' around Mr Dandy Hands the Camp Trombone Teacher’s closet until they get to play chess with him type... The ones that used to peep furtively at the jock girls playing netball in the gymnasium in short skirts, and then run off to hide, shuffling through corridors type. Yeah... you were probably one of 'em. If not, then your older brother used to sit on 'em for his lunch money. Well yeah, anyway… those geeks, those kids with the broken glasses would love to make an album like this. If they stopped being such pussies and had some goddamn guts, that is! If they'd just let go.

The Thermals: a kinda lo-fidelity hotchpotch of who’s who in the filthy, I’ve shagged your brother five times, so cliché that it’s eaten itself and it's not even funny anymore world of American indie rock, have come and laid a plate of spastic, bubbling pop punk on our fuzzy asses. The band, who count nasally blessed singer Hutch Harris (Hutch & Kathy), bassist Kathy Foster (All-Girl Summer Fun Band and Hutch & Kathy), drummer boy Jordan Hudson (Operacycle) and thank the dear lord he’s not singing Kinda Like Shitting star Ben Barnett amongst their ranks, have created an album of stretching, schorching scuzz-pop for a rather strung-out, arsing about in cars kinda summer soundtrack. Teenage exuberance never sounded this fast and furious. Not if drugs were involved.

The cellars are alive: 'More Parts Per Million' is the jangling, scattershot thud of Lou Barlow on a lunch break, jamming in the backroom, fiddling with one of his 1,000,789 side-projects, with a sensitive Portland indie boy letting off his deepest fears into a wired-up microphone. The microphone hangs from the ceiling. They get drunk on thick, black coffee. They trash culture icons. It’s the kinda album my slightly younger 'college rok hero' self would have probably made if I hadn’t got so damn tired of ‘band-politics’ and pissing pretence (and there's none of that here). Hell, the singer Hutch even sounds like me, in my wildly out-of-tune, faux-yankee doodle eMo caustic-coaster. He’s got more balls than me though, probably more hair on his chest. He sounds like he’s been clambering into a few rocket-fuelled jalopies and screaming around a lush, verdant Pacific North-West scenery, consisting of the K Records headquarters with a chewed-up Guided By Voices bootleg of bumbling popsta nuggets seeping through the dashboard. All of this on a big phat truckload of pure, brain-sizzling caffeine.

Gung-ho eastwards and climb a pea-lorry, kid. This is an album of shit your pants in the front seat cos we’re going too fast intensity that screeches by in just under half an hour, and doesn’t take it's foot off the gas or fluctuate from it’s punctuation pop meets steam roller bassline meets big dumbo college rock guitar chunkafuckinglunka in it’s thirteen track entirety. The brakes don't squeal. The basements groan. I’m not even gonna mention the words ‘a little darn repetitive’ or ‘no darn variety’, cos I don’t fucken care. It’s good. It’s an Oregon lumberjack’s celebratory shotgun blast for a rolling, pop monster of an album. It’s blistering shrapnel in the rain. It’ll git your geeky ass a' shakin' anyway...

"Go fast, go slow, go sly, go low. All systems intact, the red and the black."