Hop aboard the Space Barn and experience this funkadelic foray into all things noise! The American quintet are showing us the full potential of ‘the THUMP’ machine…
“You always do your ‘old man at a wedding’ impression as your go-to dance move–”
“–I do? I always do that?”
Comically perplexed is probably how most listeners would describe their first immersion within the world of Thumpasaurus.
Watching frontman Lucas Tamaren gripping the back of the sofa in steadfast sceptism, his bandmate’s accusation causing him to send the furniture rocking, is a lovely pastiche of physical comedy.
“Do I do it before Alien Sex Tape?”
“No, not on stage. When we’re at a club you’ll pull out this move that I feel is just you tapping into your soul and we’re watching a caricature of the future.”
Paul Cornish – keyboardist and now known for keying into his band’s senile semantics – is quite blunt when he says that his trick is the Saturday Night Fever dance.
Given their recent single Dance Like It’s Your Life is as down-and-dirty funk as you can get, the question had to be posed: if you had to dance like your life depended on it, what would be your go-to dance move?
“I don’t even know what he’s talking about, but I believe him!”
And you’d best believe that the crowd at The Bodega tonight are talking the same jazz-tinged fuzzy-punk language.
If the sold-out show isn’t enough to convince you, the Los Angeles quintet have achieved that status across every venue on their UK tour.
Witnessing how the band cultivates this theatrical narrative of gritty, operatic numbers with lo-fi PowerPoint projections of… Super Mario C64 graphics?
An eagle morphing into a John Travolta AI? It’s something, alright.
How does the band know when a song has that ‘something’? The ‘THUMP’, if you will?
“We don’t really think about it until people ask us and even then, our answer is marinated in nonsense.
“I think it’s just the organic noise that comes out of all of us together,”
Tamaren is now seated firmly on the sofa. “Most of us studied jazz in college so it’s hugely influential in our sound but we were never going for a particular direction.
“It’s always been an unspoken thing that whatever grows or changes from a session together, we’re not going to question it.
“We’re just going to do what we like to do, and we liked what we heard.”
Bassist Logan Kane adds: “The ‘THUMP’ truly comes out in the live show best because we get to play each song differently every night.
“We don’t really use backing tracks, so it always feels alive and we can bounce spontaneously off each other.
“It comes out in the writing too as we usually record with everyone in the same room.
“We’ll have no structure or melody, and everyone does their own thing. You definitely know when you hear it.”
Having Loose Articles join them on tour is an endorsement of this niche genre that you can’t quite pin down.
It’s boisterously groovy and unhinged, yet the two bands on the bill tonight have a bark that’s just as big as their bite.
Evidently so with the audience frequently shouting out and both bands treating each heckle as a conversation. Literally.
We’ve got a Lord of the Rings debate going on; Loose Articles have somehow organised a house party with a fan for their album release; by the time Thumpasaurus take to the stage, one heckler in particular gets singled out.
“This guy has been f**king yapping all night – what’s your name?” And brilliantly, ‘Shane’ could not have been a more perfect pick.
“Shame? Yeah, you’re damn right shameful and we love you. Let’s give a big ol’ cheer for shame!”
It’s this ‘don’t care’ attitude translated through the speakers that is the genre. It’s this blaisé yet intricately woven music that has the band featured on American talk shows and TikTok globally.
On how the group keeps themselves grounded within their growing popularity, Tamaren says: “I think we’re betting on if we go outside of what we like doing, then it starts not working.
“We’re really bad at trying to be popular, I guess we’re just more focused on making the best stuff and hoping that people will come.
“Would we say we’ve locked into a niche? I don’t–
“–I wouldn’t say so, and I wouldn’t like that,” Cornish interrupts.
“We’ve reached a point where our last album – that was my favourite we’ve ever made personally – is our most sonically diverse.
“We made the songs very collaboratively and I like the fact we have the umbrella of Thumpasaurus to pull from every genre.”
From the bass-heavy and scat-like vocals of Space Barn to the incredulous falsettos of I’m Cute, their set seems to gain momentum in both the number of people dancing and the literal speed of the songs.
Their theatrics grow tenfold throughout and with tonight the last show of their tour, Kane says of their performances: “We’re always surprised with how well it’s received and how engaged the audience is, compared to anywhere else in the world we play. We love it over here.
“Our first time seeing a crowd surfing train was at 2000 Trees Festival. Just one after another of people crowd surfing throughout the entire gig.
“One of the guards lost a tooth but even they seemed like they were having fun amidst the chaos.
“It’s such a good vibe in England. Our smaller shows are very intimate, so it’s a learning curve when playing to a bigger audience at festivals because how can we do our tricks, but upscale them? ]
“We really are going for maximum engagement and energy at all times, it’s quite intense.
“But it’s fun. It’s like a music-based montage of adult swim. All over the place.”
Just like their musical influences ranging from Herbie Hancock to Jimi Hendrix to Talking Heads, the quintet are spoilt for choice on what direction to take a song. No two melodies are the same yet wrap them up altogether into an album and they’re consistently the Thumpasaurus sound.
(The band are also consistent in their answers to what their favourite dinosaur is. The brontosaurus).