Thee Oh Sees - Pirates of the Bay Area

John Dwyer has always been an elusive artist. One of those types who dislike standing still or being pigeonholed, and so keeps up a perpetual flight that's incomprehensible to most, endlessly changing addresses, names and musical guises, not always consciously or, at least, not out of mere calculation. An improbable artist too, if we're being honest. One who, judging solely by the deceptive details of appearances, you wouldn't exactly bet on. He's never really had, at bottom, the look or bearing of an English lord.

Anyone who's ever found themselves standing in front of him on a stage can only pay tribute to his towering stature in any hypothetical contest for the title of most unrefined frontman in all of alternative rock: unhinged mugging and tongue-waggling worthy of an epilepsy patient, utterly deranged movements, the bearing of a lopsided dockworker, and one of those back-alley physiognomies that would have delighted Lombroso. Clothes may not make the man, but they undoubtedly play a huge part in building the character and making him instantly recognizable. In John's case, we're talking about his inseparable wardrobe of striped tank tops. The mushroom-cap hair shot straight down onto his forehead, just above a pair of eyes as wide open as in a session of the "Ludovico Technique." And then there's that endless, all-over parade of tattoos, with the word "SONG" prominently displayed right under his throat, not to mention the entire flock of swallows decorating his right arm and shoulder. Watching him chew on guitar picks and play like a man possessed, guitars habitually held up around armpit height, you wouldn't give him two cents. Nor would the unsuspecting onlooker be helped by his bizarre, coarse vocal outbursts, impossible to file under "good singing" by any stretch of the imagination, and yet so crucial in lending that indispensable touch of hysteria to his battleship of a band and in steering the imprint of a group like Thee Oh Sees — notoriously slippery whenever it comes time for classification — toward punk farce. You'd never peg him as a rigorous multi-instrumentalist, and yet over the course of a decade Dwyer has taught himself to tackle every sort of musical gadget, improving through a remarkably surprising self-discipline and occasionally pushing himself, in complete solitude, to explore the limits of his own creativity, as if he still had the usual safety net of a real band behind him. It's hard to believe, but the Californian singer and musician is well beyond the slacker caricature that photo spreads scattered across the internet have tailored to fit him as a convenient pocket-sized image, from the obligatory can of cheap beer in hand to an eccentric, unhinged persona worn with calculated warmth. He's actually a cultured, well-read type, a scene organizer who's done his homework and today also dabbles as a passionate photographer, a true point of reference for his friends in the Bay Area garage scene.

Starting out from the dead calm of Providence, Rhode Island, Dwyer found (niche) success with Thee Oh Sees in San Francisco, without ever really chasing it. More as a lark than anything else, he found himself heading up a movement that never even claimed to be one: his innate charisma and his role as a hub in that scene gave momentum and prospects to a whole host of bands from the Bay Area, and much of the credit also goes to the label he founded at the root of it all, Castle Face, a mere eight years ago at that. Despite the decent recognition achieved, John and his most successful venture nevertheless remain a chapter apart even within the specific wave that's gone wild under the California sun over the past five years: a central figure, as we've seen, yet the group itself is a singular and ultimately elusive entity, aesthetically detached from the far more foundational experiences of the likes of Ty Segall or Mikal Cronin. Its frank, uncontaminated musical primitivism remains a hard fact to dispute, as well as a precious certificate of authenticity. The same goes for the band. One of those rare flotillas that love to go their own way without thereby denying crystal-clear ties to the past. A tradition, though, that's constantly reworked and brought up to date, careful to pick up on new leanings or sonic directions, avoiding passively flattening itself to them and instead renewing its own style without any fear. A lineup, then, in continuous evolution, one that's elevated total strategic and commercial indifference to a systematic modus operandi, an unstoppable live machine that has made garage-revival streaked with psychedelia — but philologically correct — its defining trait, proof of the quality of an output that doesn't ignore the genre's classics and still comes across as exquisitely "learned" even in a field where formal carelessness and noisy ecstasy have so much say. Like skilled virtuosos in disguise, the four Americans have never tired of absorbing, hybridizing with their own deviant omnivore's stylistic quirks, entire decades of furious rock music. And this without simply raging through the present as incoherent, utterly crazed splinters. A line of continuity, in their case, seems rather evident: very few other acts in the psych-rock scene of recent years can boast a sound as classic and recognizable as theirs.

Before Thee Oh Sees, beyond Thee Oh Sees

So it's in Providence that the first snapshot of this story was taken. A starting point and, at the same time, a minor footnote in its protagonist's artistic journey. John cut his teeth there, playing guitar in an obscure local noise band, Landed, with whom he released an album in 1998, "Everything's Happening." The Rhode Island scene, however, was about as lifeless as you could imagine at the tail end of a decade of great momentum for alternative music. So that same year, the twenty-four-year-old Dwyer packed his bags and moved to San Francisco. He began writing his own music under the alias Orinoka Crash Suite, but it's for his limited contribution (screeching and obsessive rhythms) to Burmese, a grindcore outfit freshly relocated from Iowa, that our man's name resurfaces in an album's credits. It's 2000. The time is ripe for a more significant venture, and the overwhelming power-noise of Pink & Brown gets to make its debut. What characterizes this duo of unleashed madmen — John as "Pink," Jeff Rosenberg as "Brown," as if it were a Tarantino film — is its uncompromising nature, allergic to any form of accommodation, a leaning as frantic and bruising as can be. After a none-too-convincing first step, the ramshackle pair released a solid sophomore effort for Tumult, Shame Fantasy II (2003), built on infesting riffs, diesel-compressor-style drumming and schizoid vocal stumps à la Ian Svenonius ("Union Bomb"), feeble bleats that, in a prolonged and stunning noise storm, never manage to surface from the sonic tide. In this first important chapter, which reached the end of the road after not even three years, John lays the groundwork for what will perhaps be the trademark of all his early productions: the golden rule of widespread approximation. It's inevitable that such a still-green formula has few genuinely strong cards to play, but there's no doubt it plays its hand to the fullest, amid assaults, rough edges and plenty of searing purity. Shame Fantasy II is a breathless sprint, a reckless headlong fall down a barren, steep, spike-ridden slope, a crazed centrifuge and a collection of sheet-metal guitars that remain among the sharpest in the entire Dwyer discography. The adrenaline hits come one after another without ever giving the listener a chance to catch their breath. There's no shortage, of course, of truly thrilling moments ("Sheriff Jessum" above all), but you'd better be prepared for a performance by genuine terrorists of the pedal board.

Zeigenbock Kopf, on the other hand, is an amusing trashy digression — passed off as a German techno-noise collective with a markedly homosexual and fetishist bent — with John in the fictional guise of Hans Bunschlaper (joined onstage by a couple of otherwise unidentified cohorts, Uli and Detlef Bunschlaper). It's remembered more for the garish excess of its live masquerades than for the quality of the clangor, robotic inserts, industrial-pop paranoia and synthetic soot packed into the four albums released under this name between 2002 and 2006 — Nocturnal Submissions being the least unbearable. Certainly not the most successful project of his career, but an experience that would surprisingly leave some creative aftereffects in Dwyer's solo debut, which arrived only in 2014 under the moniker Damaged Bug.

Drowned in ultra-reverbed, schizophrenic swamp, and formally not too far removed from Pink & Brown, the extremist garage of Yikes represents in many ways the venture with the most points of affinity to the soon-to-come Thee Oh Sees, and not only for the implicit long-distance follow-up that their "Putrifiers" would get (itself quite similar to the future California-band classic, "Ghost In The Trees"). Just one album on record, Secrets To Superflipping (2006), with lo-fi prevailing over any notion of restraint or consideration for the listener: the guitars have the hallucinatory relentlessness of air-raid sirens, the tone is impetuous, brutal, battle-ready, and the systematic tendency is to pursue confusion as the sole objective. Everywhere within the stunning electric froth, the ear encounters nothing but a swirling filth dished out by a lineup that pounds away with metallurgical regularity ("Sheets"). Ragged, disfigured, sharp-edged, fiercely yet, in their own way, genuinely naïve: masters of ceremony at genuine tetanus parties, amid ignoble feedback purges and rhythmic walls bordering on autism, Yikes remain, in the end, a playful diversion not without its own scruffy, out-of-catalogue charm. The venture of The Hospitals, on the other hand, seems altogether more linear, born in the groove of an acidic, screeching garage-rock, loaded with noisy grime and lo-fi dissonance straight out of the then-dominant Woodsist playbook.

The turning point comes in 2008 with the release of the third LP, Hairdryer Peace, a frayed, derailing nonsense fresco that manages to make a splash. In what is effectively Adam Stonehouse's brainchild, John limits himself to sadistic guitar excoriations before soon abandoning his occasional bandmates. This project and his other early-days ventures fit neatly into the framework of the so-called Californian weird-garage and shitgaze strains, but there's also no shortage of experiments with flimsy synth-wave or free-jazz experimentalism that find him working mostly as a drummer (as is the case with Sword & Sandals, another minor side venture). For a very brief stretch Dwyer plays, and sometimes even sings, in the death-metal collective Dig That Body Up, It's Alive!, in Netmen (alongside Brian Gibson of Lightning Bolt) and in The Drums, a band that merely shares its name with the far more famous New York combo.

What truly shines, though, before Thee Oh Sees, is the fortunate run of Coachwhips, a weirdo-punk trio responsible for five excellent albums in under five years, recently pulled out of mothballs for a series of fun one-off shows while Dwyer took a reflective break from his main band. The best title in the catalogue is hands-down the mini-album Bangers Vs. Fuckers, released on Narnack in late 2003. A devastating, ferocious wave crammed into barely a dozen quick lashes, a frontal assault of herculean power that radicalizes the winning formula of the White Stripes during their breakout years (just listen to "Recline, Recline"). Unflappable, overwhelming, direct and charmingly barbaric, chaotic without ever feeling gratuitous in their attacks, the band is an exhilarating gang of vandals who, in eighteen scruffy minutes, slap the listener around, kicking up an incredible amount of dust and swinging with blind fury. The sharp, foaming guitar is the same one John will show off in the years to come, but the temperament here is, if anything, even wilder and more fiercely DIY. A real gem, Bangers vs. Fuckers, from a band of uncompromising purity, unleashed in violent close combat with our ears and utterly free to run wild. The frontman's lyrics remain stubbornly ungraspable, and the keyboards, mercilessly pounded by Mary Ann McNamara, are more precious than ever, before finally catching their breath in the hallucinated close of "Goodnite, Goodbye."

On the farewell album, Peanut Butter and Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge, the coordinates remain largely the same, but the overall tone turns even more caustic and abrasive: a triumph of schizoid obsessions built on torched organs and hissing feedback, pushed to the nth degree, reaching its peak in the formidable, decadent closer "Your Party Will Be A Success."

John dances alone

In the wake of shelving Pink & Brown, Dwyer decides to pursue, more concretely this time, the old moniker Orinoka Crash Suite, and steps out into the open under that same name, condensed into an acronym (OCS) which over the years will also be attached to other full expansions (Orange County Sound being the most widely credited). The pretext is the search for a sound, something distinctive through which he can record new material on his own amid a riot of homemade experimentation. Bit by bit there will be room for collaboration with other musicians, for the project's evolution from a simple solo whim into a fully fledged band, but at the outset it's only his companion Jeff Rosenberg who joins John, and even then only sporadically.
The result of these first unhurried sessions is 1 (Tumult, 2003), a collection of sound fragments in which nothing even remotely resembles a song form. It's mostly grotesque sonic evolutions in which reverbs swell, ferment and stretch into gloomy ambient distortions, or else get tangled into a mess that would be charitable to call ramshackle. The problem is that there are fifty-two of these senseless torments, these exercises in pure sonic terrorism — pretty excruciating and, on the whole, dreadfully long-winded: formless miasmas, gurgles, assorted noise and drones at will, rippled with the utmost slowness, their static nature taking very little time to wear thin.
The second of the two parts is marginally better, stuffed with (mostly) acoustic instrumental sketches that are moderately disturbed, but the impression of an exercise undertaken purely for its own sake never goes away, even in the extremely rare cases where you can catch a glimpse of what the guitarist might later apply his ideas to. All things considered, 1 is remembered for the little it's worth, a jumble of confused, extremely lo-fi vignettes that can, at best, only be recommended to die-hard completists. Compared to the rambling junk contained within, the titles of the two sections that make up 1 (34 Reasons Why Life Goes On Without You and 18 Reasons To Love Your Hater To Death) remain, unforgivingly and by a landslide, the best thing about the whole operation.

Not content with that, less than a year later John doubles down. He sticks, with only modest improvements, to the same operating line as its predecessor. 2 (Narnack, 2004) is another mumbling heap of acoustic stumps, background junk and a string of cheap effects that only rarely — if you stretch your imagination — resemble actual songs with a beginning and an end (“I Would Drown In Regret,” the deviant folk of “No Bitches On This Train”). There's an abundance of sickly assemblages made more of moods than of sounds, slapdash patch-jobs thrown together with nothing for the sheer fun of it (the banjo interludes, the melodica, the mangled strings), all presented in a dreadful package. Vocal contributions, meanwhile, remain quite scarce, and so timid as to seem almost transparent (“Left Me Dry,” “Killed Yourself”), right up to the ironic autobiographical farewell “JPD, A Young Man, Tells Goldylox Thanksss,” so mild and bland that it renders Dwyer almost unrecognizable. In this unhealthy, frothing cauldron there are still only a few expressive flashes worth noting — the kind capable of giving rise to reworkings that would genuinely underpin the style of the future Thee Oh Sees — beyond a disposition already sufficiently resistant to convenient pigeonholing.
2 comes across, in short, as the work of an indifferent, indecipherable, boldly naïve artist who nonetheless keeps leaving you puzzled.

2005 is the end of the line for the OCS project. John, however, has so much material stashed away that he can afford himself the luxury of a double farewell album. It's in this format that, again for Narnack, the last two chapters of early Dwyer's slim solo discography see the light of day: the twin releases 3 – Songs About Death & Dying and 4 – Get Stoved (later also issued separately on vinyl). Keeping the Providence musician company now is Patrick Mullins, quite sparing with percussion and musical saw, while the choral contributions of the still-green Brigid Dawson — previously in Mix Tape with Meric Long of the Dodos — prove precious. With Songs About Death & Dying, John's creature finally edges into Thee Oh Sees territory, even if everything is still hazy, stumbling, only sketched out, and it's no accident that the best episodes here will later be revisited with far greater vitality. The tempo here is ultra-slowed down. The vocals come out buried, mushy, while rhythmic contributions are practically absent and the guitars prove unable to ward off a generally bloodless, otherworldly tone. The impression is of a washed-out psych-folk tormented by various rough edges and kept on a resolutely approximate plane, even though the core stylistic traits of the band that will emerge shortly after already seem to be all there, at least potentially.
We're still in the territory of the gloomy, disturbed solipsism of the previous releases: extremely fragile song sketches in acoustic guise with grimy touches, stunted little chants that even pay homage to traditional country-folk, hinting at John's omnivorous bent (“Here I Come” or “Greedy Happens,” a ragged number that might recall the first, threadbare Beck). There's no denying a crude and fiercely weird approach, but flashes of grace aren't lacking either, even if they struggle to surface in a sonic picture so geared toward sadism. What emerges are listless, jagged vignettes, often with Brigid taking center stage, still in a more autistic form than a genuinely evocative one, yet already hinting at how much she'll have to offer the cause thanks to her slight but enchanting retro delivery: one of those devices the Oh Sees will make great use of, only to drop it abruptly with the next name change, like a page firmly turned. Belonging instead to the branch of ideas later discarded is the ecstatic, romantic John of “Lily & Me,” which, heard again with hindsight, is surprising and even rather touching. Much space on Songs About Death & Dying is given over to noise, intrusive and disturbing: a grain that's constantly overexposed, rancid tears, distortions that will later become overused (“Oh No, Bloody Nose”); but also clean picking soon betrayed by a flood of reverb, ghostly aberrations of a band-in-sketch-form still geared toward trademark sabotage, toward a luminous, experimental music, with all the naivety that implies (“I Am Slow”).

Get Stoved presents itself with a somewhat less timid approach, moving between fine moments of radiant lo-fi pop contemplation (“Wait All Nite”), hypnotic lullabies for the woozy (“Crime On My Mind”), little songs grubbied up without much care (“Devil's Last Breath”) and innocent, traditionalist dirges (“Oh Babe, It Ain't No Lie,” “Cookie Destroyer”). Still an incoherent collection, almost blatantly so, and riddled with flaws, but one that lets you recognize, in its halting ideas, the purity of a group still cutting its teeth — nowhere near savvy yet, but sincere in a way it perhaps never will be again. Heard almost ten years later, it rewards the Thee Oh Sees fan by letting them sift through its various avenues, distinguishing the ones later abandoned from those destined to bear fruit once the band gained more courage and plugged into more aggressive amplifiers. Moments lit up by subtle seductions aren't rare, but everything stays on the always-imperfect plane of these simple, embryonic divertissements, many of them condemned to oblivion (the emblematic, delightful “Harmony & Bells”). The tendency is still toward digression. There's no stable, certain guiding line yet, and for now they're content with the pleasure of drifting loosely along.
Rudimentary and roughed up in form as they are, the melodies still give good reason to hope for Dwyer's real talent, still gawky and swaying here, lost in his relaxed expressive hideaway. This fourth little chapter of the OCS adventure thus easily wins the prize for the most convincing material, even if it's dished out in a condition of obvious stylistic work-in-progress — murky, yet fascinating. By journey's end, the encouraging insights on record are numerous: enough to sketch the outline of a collective finally ready to leap, from this curious but limited amateurism, into something far more significant.

Highbrow garage?

In little more than two years John has dismantled Pink & Brown, Zeigenbock Kopf and Coachwhips. Even so, the search for a new sound that underpinned the OCS experience can be said to be over. Carrying on solo, he's now realized, would no longer make sense. Hence the decision to fully co-opt Dawson into the team and start afresh under a new name, trying to develop further what had already proven worthwhile. The Ohsees are thus born in 2006 in a spirit of continuity: same trio, same small label, but rising ambitions. The choice to hand production of the new album to Dave Sitek, together with a guest spot from fellow TV On the Radio member Kyp Malone, ought to speak volumes in that direction. Yet The Cool Death Of Island Raiders still insists on competing with the handbrake on. In defiance of the wild excesses of the Coachwhips brand, the early Ohsees traffic in a thoroughly skewed sunshine-pop. It's intermittent, approximate, slight, jangly and limping, literally drowned in a bath of putrid lo-fi. Narcotic textures, sparing electronic intrusions (courtesy of Patrick Mullins) and the usual bizarre arsenal (the musical saw makes more than one cameo) give shape to a naïve blend that's enjoyable but undeniably fragile. Amid twittering, hazy unease, elusive (deliberately messy) rhythms and the ethereal flourishes supplied by the band's unusual English chanteuse, confusion tends to reign supreme: a lush jungle occasionally pierced by stray rays of sunlight. The choral embellishments, even when uncertain or merely sketched, already leave a mark. In this way a ghostly dream-logic takes shape, leading into another dimension, among multicolored crystals, acid fermentations and subtle psychedelic shading (the flutes are a real treat), where nothing can be hastily filed away as “sixties.” That this is psych-folk is beyond doubt; that it's packed with atmosphere, rippling reverb and fluttering digressions, equally so. And yet it remains an atypical proposition, not easy to pin down.
“Broken Stems” is about as close as you get to a mission-statement track for this crooked rock-revival, somewhere between skin-and-bones garage and a dazed girl group. So too “We Are Free,” another highly representative episode — perhaps the most romantic and crepuscular of all — with a remarkably restrained, placid, ecstatic Dwyer, and a lovely calm dictated by the guitars before the noise moves in to saturate every space and the song bursts into a small noise blaze. These are ballads for lovesick werewolves, lit exclusively by moonlight, and they're not the only ones. The one real exception, to be fair, is just that couple of drones — a residual legacy of the earliest OCS's ambient extremism — which in this context add nothing and, if anything, break up a mesmerizing flow by pausing it without any real need to. This happens around the midpoint and near the close, just before a final dive into dense nostalgic fog (“You Oughta Go Home”), lit here and there only by John's incoherent, seraphic jangle. It's the hallmark of a band still poor and quiet, in no way nervy or explosive — one that limits itself, at most, to dishing out pleasant lysergic sensations (“Cool Deaths”) in a picture not too far removed from hazy, hypnagogic fragmentation, remaining, deep down, a delicate stylistic exercise undertaken for its own sake. Odd, disorienting, anomalous in its naive inconclusiveness — the seed, and nothing more, of a formula still very much undefined.

Big news is nonetheless on the horizon. The Ohsees become a quartet with the arrival of Petey Dammitt of Tres Ferocious, a guitarist who plays a Fender Jazzmaster as if it were a bass, using an electronic device of his own invention. Curiosities aside, for the band's sound this represents a major step forward in terms of heft, even if concrete results won't show for a couple more years. At the end of 2006 John also founds his own label, Castle Face, together with Matt Jones of Blasted Canyons and filmmaker Brian Lee Hughes.
The band's new effort, Sucks Blood, marks the debut release for the small label, which will go on to put out, among others, the self-titled records of Ty Segall and Fresh & Onlys, as well as work by Bare Wires, White Fence, Warm Soda, Fuzz, Pow!, plus a wide array of reissues from Dwyer's back catalog. This is a consolidating record, pushing further in the direction already taken, and it reveals a new self-awareness. The opening is scratchy, ramshackle, catatonic, all little voices and instruments thrown into the fray haphazardly, but without going overboard. The guitar in particular sounds like a cheese grater, helping to define the sonic physiognomy that, in synergy with the four Californians' unmistakable lazy, scrappy bent, will soon become an Ohsees trademark. The points of contact with the debut are obvious, starting with the languid retro melancholy on full display in the superb title track. Still slow, even narcotic rhythms, then, but also an almost painterly care for nuance within an anomalous proposition, dense with unease, undeniably personal and seductive: coordinates reaffirmed by “Iceberg” in a form that, if anything, is even slighter and quieter, with exquisite glimpses of fine contemplation that seem placed there deliberately to disprove the stereotype of John as an overly crude songwriter (the following “The Gouger,” with him in the role of sublime old-fashioned crooner, can only sound twice as bizarre as a result).

Once again, hearing the San Francisco outfit's first, eccentric incarnation in hindsight is a little disorienting, especially given the far greater weight Brigid Dawson carried in the group's economy during this, so to speak, aestheticizing phase. Sucks Blood doesn't betray a certain rigorous coherence, while still saving room for true gems like “Ship,” still in line with a sunshine-pop-folk veering into rancid tones (with bells in the background accentuating the whole's sour coloring), or “Golden Phones,” one of the band's earliest jewels. Spare, drenched in reverb but also remarkably melodious and clear, without ever sounding mannered or affected as a result, the Ohsees strike with their astonishing delicacy — proof of a taste you'd never have suspected lurking in the baggage of a scruffy garage band.
Dirtied up by odd, homemade noises, the muted hypnotic ballads reveal unexpected affinities with the more refined, less trashy Cocorosie (“What The Driven Drive”). Genuine masters of enchantment, then — it's really the only way to put it — who nonetheless don't like to rest on their laurels, and seem especially keen on experimenting with strange combinations in bubbling episodes, lit up by flashes of vital unease and able to fuse, quite aptly, two very distinct souls: the ethereal, swooning one embodied by Dawson, and a far darker, more nervous, alienated one that belongs exclusively to Dwyer (“Invitation,” “The Killer”). It's this second strand in particular that accounts for the damaged, phlegmatic, morbid and deliberately disordered tone that's more evident elsewhere but remains one of the group's expressive constants — sensational in loading their songs with underlying tensions destined to stay essentially unresolved. Rounding off the picture are a couple of further sonic hallucinations which, more than ever on this occasion, prove to be the product of a secondary, by-now out-of-focus perspective.

Between 2007 and 2008 the Ohsees are a work in progress. In a matter of months, Patrick Mullins, Jigmae Baer (later briefly with Ty Segall) and Mike Shoun take turns behind the drums, but the inconsistency leaves no major scars in a phase where the drum kit remains, for the group, almost a phantom instrument. This is nonetheless a two-year period of profound evolution for the American outfit, which has effectively reached the end of one exploration and is ready to open a new, far more exciting chapter. The snapshot of the exact instant of this change of course — or rather, the last frame of the old band in the very act of passing the baton to the new one — is titled The Hounds Of Foggy Notion, and it's officially a live album, even though, paradoxically, the recordings it's drawn from turn out clearer and more accurate than on any previous release. Very few of the songs that make it up are unreleased. But the others come out far more fluid, fast and harmonious than their original versions, presented in a finally coherent set that makes this collection a solid, self-standing work, certainly no less artistically worthy than the band's first tentative steps.
What prevails, through and through, is the gentle line that exalts the band's bizarre psychedelic revival, where Dawson's ethereal, timeless voice is the undisputed star, while the (hardly flashy) percussion takes on the burden of the rhythms, no instrument aims to take over, and even the bandleader himself seems engaged in a game of hide-and-seek of his own, with the guitar reduced to a mere decorative trinket. Of course, it's still the usual fragile, stumbling yet original psych-folk, strongly evocative despite the limits of a still very poor (though never shabby) production. As well as, if not better than, in Cool Death and Sucks Blood, the retro flourishes Brigid brings to the table give these spare songs a clear-cut identity and manage to deliver enchanting suggestions with very little, escorted by John's unassuming but luminous jangle (“Dumb Drums,” the wonderful “Curtains”).

Thus we get, amid acid-tinged girl-group preciousness, relaxed and gently hypnotic grooves, a lullaby that rocks the listener placidly (“Make Them Kiss”), or a fantastic, diaphanous and exquisitely refined backward-looking number that reads like an insinuating nursery rhyme (“Dreadful Heart”), not to mention the disorienting Dawson-led chant stitched onto a hazy atmospheric backdrop (“Highland's Wife Lament”): cut-rate psychedelia, perhaps, but guaranteed to land. And here, in their last appearances, is Mullins's musical saw once more, delightful in duets with the guitar and with Brigid at her most languid ever (“Golden Phones,” how could it be otherwise), lending that extra dash of weird enchantment to these little delights. The older songs thus find a more satisfying definition that does them justice; the rest is handled by the inevitable '30s and '40s echoes in the vocalist's mischievous trilling. With premises like these, The Hounds Of Foggy Notion also works as an excellent summary of the Californian outfit's early experiences: a precious stylistic record of the sublime peculiarity of the first-era Ohsees, destined never to be significantly revisited and soon shelved by the band, already marching toward new and more ambitious horizons. The feeling of being immersed in a dream without temporal footholds is strong, its outlines uncertain, its views hazy, its luminism always pale and diffuse, set against an emotional approach still minimalist yet still able to deliver melodic nuances that are incredibly sensual and, in fact, memorable. In this picture, roughness is a device used sparingly, making it function in exactly the right way, much like the subtle noise textures: tricks deployed without ever overdoing it, flawless in lending a romantic, decadent aura, or in further animating pieces already rich in charm, without ever tipping into noise for noise's sake.
Almost in passing, livelier moments like “Block Of Ice” or “Ghost In The Trees” already hint at ideas the quartet is experimenting with elsewhere, in the studio, though kept here in a less boisterous variant so as not to undermine the collection's unplugged coherence. The record thus offers more than one useful clue about the band's imminent metamorphosis, previews from a new album that's by now effectively ready. Seeds, germs, drafts of a drive still only potential, uncertain, provisional, yet thoroughly interesting.
But that will be Thee Oh Sees — a whole different story, really.

Hello noise. Hello easy-listening. Hello Thee Oh Sees

The leap in quality soon follows. Mike Shoun earns a permanent spot in the lineup, proving himself the right man for the job — the one capable of catapulting his shy creature into a “more party-ready” dimension, of giving it, through his dizzying drumming, the chance for an abrupt turn first and foremost in character. The leap in quality could only follow as a consequence, now finally credited to Thee Oh Sees. The name change amounts to no more than one extra vowel and a bit more spacing; the label stays the “family” one shared with the two most immediate predecessors. And yet The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In is light years away from anything John has put out so far. Part of the credit, in all likelihood, goes to the guru of the Sacramento punk scene, Chris Woodhouse, back working with Dwyer after years apart (“I've Visited The Island Of Jocks And Jazz” by the Hospitals was the last time), ready to kick off a partnership that will never again be broken. Even a listener free of ulterior motives needs only a few seconds to register that what's happened at the Californian group's headquarters is a genuinely radical turn. The rhythms have become dominant, the guitars shriller, the sound rounder and more thunderous, the whole approach breezier: the Oh Sees have suddenly turned into a steamroller, a “joyful war machine,” while still trying, at the same time, to approach more accessible and transparent formulas, less murky or chaotic.
Sure, noise, reverb, thunder, cheap effects and pitch-black pools remain the San Francisco outfit's favorite devices, but now its songs come across as granite-solid and self-assured as never before. Obsessive, anguished sonorities have started going hand in hand with a thoroughly enjoyable slacker carelessness, giving rise to impure, sinister, menacing hybrids full of grime yet far less naive than they might seem. Happily rockish and devastating, the Oh Sees push old garage stereotypes to a point of sublimation within the uncertain limits of a formless, relentless, pointed and all-consuming style. As in the incredible “Two Drummers Disappear” (a nod to Mullins and Baer's departure?), where the playful side is perhaps second only to the scorching impact of their arsenal, as ever thick with impurities, shards, gravel; or as in “Grease 2,” a tasty romp of the kind they'll churn out by the dozen later on — light as children's nursery rhymes, sharp as old sheet metal, sturdy as the rickety spin cycle of a washing machine.
Irresistible rides follow one after another without a break, now more now less ungainly due to an approximation that's nevertheless never overbearing. In this nonstop maelstrom, the two guitars flare up often and gladly without ever stopping, without closing themselves off in pointless self-indulgent noodling, preferring instead to keep up their impassive, breathless sprint. Likewise, disciplined spirals and vortices never swallow the songs whole or strip them of their own elusive structure, and this too rightly counts among their most praiseworthy traits: form never forces itself bodily over substance. If the rhythm engine fueled by Dammitt's relentless electric grater proves simply formidable, what's genuinely scaled back is Dawson's role: unusually hushed and eel-like (at times) alongside her male counterpart, she's reduced to a pale enclave on the record; “You Will See This Dog Before You Die” stands as a rancid leftover from the previous catalog, drowned here without mercy in an ambiguous, cumbersome field recording. The four Californians prove relentless in a central stretch that slyly draws on easy-listening options, systematically roughing them up through their own noisy grime and the lock-picks of a lo-fi kept, in any case, well below the danger threshold: powerful episodes, in short, yet capable of embracing a more properly pop lightness. “Grease” is perhaps the title — backward-looking almost out of necessity — in which it's easiest to grasp the quality of the group's expressive détournements, philologically precise and careful even in their acts of sabotage (including of worn-out doo-wop clichés).

Unyielding in their borderline-cocky frankness, John and his bandmates etch into the record's grooves some of their greatest classics for the devilish live repertoire of years to come. Among them, “Block Of Ice” and “Ghost In The Trees,” but also the far-from-accommodating twelve-inch “Quadrospazzed,” one of the frothiest, most deranged tracks of the bunch — a riot of tangles and sonic chasms where the molten sound proves especially violent and overwhelming (its torrential virulence will find a worthy continuation in some of the most explosive and venomous passages of Carrion Crawler / The Dream). The record, in short, is like a black cloud heralding a storm and bringing acid rain. It's a sensational work even just in the moments where it opens up to contemplation, as in “Graveyard Drug Party,” an ecstatic moloch loaded with contradictions and implicit underlying tensions, recalling the effervescent Besnard Lakes of the same period.
The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In really is one of the collective's key albums. Thoroughly vital, apt in practically every respect, crucial to the band's evolution. And transitional, yet in a sense already definitive. Mad and melancholy, highbrow and leaden, Thee Oh Sees thus lay the foundations of an aesthetic that from here on will be — depending on the occasion — roughened up or pushed to extremes, compromised by an encounter with a mythological past, or flung, as if driverless, into a stance of self-satisfied, full-blown derailment.
Ever since the perfect quartet took shape with the recruitment of Mike Shoun, Thee Oh Sees increasingly command attention as a formidable live band, wild and overwhelming in just the right measure. With Master's Bedroom they kick off an almost unbroken tour that will see them constantly crisscrossing the globe, earning their keep with sweat and watts, be it in the sun-baked afternoons of the hottest festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, or on the ramshackle stages of small provincial clubs, on nights that are anything but glamorous. They'll only shut the engines down five years later, long after being noticed and promoted by In The Red — the Los Angeles label that launched Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Dirtbombs believes in them and gives them total creative freedom.

With Chris Woodhouse back in the producer's chair, that trust is soon repaid with Help, an album that's extroverted to say the least and that promises to go well beyond its blatant Beatles-esque nod. “Enemy Destruct” is the emblem of a running start: a jolt of adrenaline placed right at the opening, as if striking while the iron of the previous album was still red-hot. Shoun hammers away like a blacksmith, the guitars grind and spin with metronomic regularity, but mayhem is always ready to erupt around every corner. The Americans' euphoric streak takes no time at all to assert itself, with a thoroughly over-the-top Dwyer working through one of his relentless little tunes. The outfit is thus louder and brighter than ever, its fervor close to overflowing, while winking at a happily revivalist pop. John and Brigid, in cahoots for the whole ride, conjure the ghosts of new wave à la B-52's, even though the band has always flatly rejected the comparison, being far scrappier and more abrasive than that model, launched at listeners like a runaway car. Melodically speaking, this is their boldest or most compromised work, depending on your point of view, but these dips into easy-listening never translate into a trivialization of their own scheme. What's simply recorded is a temporary stepping-beyond, carried out purely for the fun of it, without overthinking things and without warping themselves through clearly ill-advised mash-ups.
The outfit thus doesn't give up its blatant lack of seriousness, that mask somewhere between facetious and hallucinated, called upon to create a fine contrast with the heavy calibers of their rock arsenal, itself up to its neck in debt to seventies orthodoxy (the flutes light up vague progressive aromas here and there, for instance). It's precisely these clever short-circuits, triggered intermittently by the bandleader's mesmeric vocals, that ensnare you relentlessly thanks to a weirdness that feels like a sparkling rosette — roguish, but never pandering. The schizoid streak thus cheerfully resurfaces, foreshadowing some (occasional) future developments, even though the choice to give room to a particularly contagious lightness is never disavowed (as in the unexaggerated jangle of “A Flag In The Court”). Even when reining in the noisy outbursts or rhythmic hyperbole, even when keeping its singsong, blissfully carefree lo-fi attitude on a leash, the Californian band has what it takes to properly entertain its audience, and it does so through breezy romps, geared more toward bubblegum or surf-rock than toward the previous record's sinister incarnations. When they look unhesitatingly to the golden-age West Coast psychedelia, Thee Oh Sees prove genuinely convincing, irresistible. A more assertive, ecstatic Dawson (“Can You See?”) seems far better deployed, in focus, perfectly functional in sunshine-pop mode, and it hardly matters that, in the closing track, those pretty retro clichés get a deceptive revival only to be fed to a lo-fi treatment that, almost out of necessity, takes no care with them whatsoever. Lysergic distortion, as mentioned, never fails to show up in just the right place and moment, as do the floral digressions, and this unquestionably makes Help one of the band's sunniest, most joyful albums — the one that, in all likelihood, the four San Franciscans had the most fun writing and recording.
Then again, of course, from a collective that has made rule-breaking its guiding star, it would be absurd not to expect exceptions. On this, their fifth LP specifically, the anomaly shows up rather late, with the grim, looming “Destroyed Fortress Reappears,” driven by John's autistic delivery. The sonic wall stays dominant, obsessive, relentless, but what cracks it open is precisely that undercurrent of alienating madness that warps, corrupts and crumbles the solidity of the structure in a finale of perhaps inevitable combustion. In the overall picture, the detour is absorbed without a hitch, and the blend couldn't in fact be more enjoyable, a little like the unexpected sixties echoes scattered here and there, in turn defaced or pumped up depending on the mood and the moment. So the Thee Oh Sees garage sound finally has a clear, confident identity, and the success of the formula, at least within the comfortable confines of their own backyard, really does seem within reach. Credit for that also goes to an important consolidating album, which is exactly what Help remains in every respect.

Trash Galore

The two records released in just over a year, along with a relentless touring schedule, helped spread the name of Thee Oh Sees beyond the narrow confines of the garage scene. For the band, 2009 proves to be one of those truly memorable years: besides the usual string of minor 7" and 12" releases, the quartet puts out an EP shared with the late Jay Reatard, one in collaboration with Paul Cary, and the first of two split singles with their rapidly rising disciple, Ty Segall; a week before Help, record stores also see the arrival of the first collection of outtakes and career oddities, Zork's Tape Bruise, followed a few months later by a new LP, Dog Poison.
What the two records have in common is a firm resolve to put on hold the more accessible leanings that had made their most direct predecessors so irresistible, in order to dive instead into the rawer, more reckless sounds in their arsenal. Zork's Tape Bruise catches the San Francisco band in full vigor, even aggressive in the menacing way it looms over the listener. John and Brigid sound the charge with their indistinguishable little voices while the guitars flay, spin-dry and crumple themselves through combustion, only to snap right back into the fray like electric ghosts. In what will turn out to be one of the most forceful, abrasive collections in their catalog, that unmistakable combative streak that so deeply marked all of Dwyer's early work returns: the songs essentially look like careless, graceless, bruising cheese-graters, consolidating a garage-punk formula that may limp along a little, but is perpetually hallucinated and just vicious enough. We're traveling at high levels of genre typicality here, with the usual raids in the shape of lunar, armor-plated little songs (emblematic is "Bloody Water", with Dawson front and center), all wrapped in consistently decent production, proof that, in their case, the line between A-sides and leftovers stays entirely up for grabs.
The temperament keeps a careful mid-slope stance between playful and unruly, so that the jolts generated by the fuzz pedals and the firepower of Dammitt's engine are reliably softened by the de-dramatizing euphoria that permeates every crack, a kind of signature for a tough band determined never to take itself too seriously (if only to avoid lapsing into an obvious caricature of meanness). Beyond a rowdier, shriller outfit than even their already remarkable average, the childlike refrains are reaffirmed, along with that cheerfully unhinged tone, key ingredients in painting yet another fine contrast. Over the demos on the first record, recorded by John alone on a four-track (the elegiac "Heart Sweat" and the smooth — thoroughly sick — "Wave Hi To Vicar" and "Backdoor" are the best moments), one ends up preferring the anthology of unreleased tracks and B-sides on the second. It's here, for instance, that you find, in a happily deranged unfolding, the genuine gem of this phase of stubborn evolution, "Kingsmeat": layering, ulcerations, swellings, over-reverbed ghosts, little organs and bellowing guitars share the scene in a minor jewel of the Oh Sees discography, richly decadent in mood yet without the faintest shadow of affectation, with lovely twilight melodies you can sense lurking at the bottom of the murky electric mire, the seal of the sick, defaced romanticism that confirms Dwyer as its unrivaled champion. Elsewhere there's room for unusual options, projected into the past (old sinister tricks like the musical saw), into the future (the strings of "I Agree" shaping a vaguely funereal chamber-music feel, a wilted-party atmosphere, anticipating Putrifiers II by a few years) or into a dystopian present simply because it's so disorienting (the slow, alienated boogie of "Komas", the mimetic stance that in "Hey Buddy" shows them tending to the clichés of '60s teen tragedy ballads in the manner of Shannon & The Clams): atypical but convincing solutions from a crew of skilled revivalists who know the genre's ABCs inside out and don't disappoint even when dealing with stylistic parasitism.

Taken in lightly at a casual listen within this pleasant compilation showcase, Thee Oh Sees' songs might seem to all resemble one another, but in truth no two are alike. Credit perhaps goes to the superb water-diviner instincts for improvisation that the bandleader never fails to exercise. Adrift, yet fearless, and indeed always under the banner of blissful tinkering. Autistic plunges and ecstatic sublimations coexist as usual with an outstanding gift for synthesis, dodging the insincere comfort of programmatic, crowd-pleasing formalism. The result is a collection that's anything but pretentious, with tracks that are classic and surprising in their own way, and which is also appreciated for its commendable variety: episodes less crushed by their own expressive devices, and with more breathing room than the already flattering norm set by the Californian band. Released by the microscopic Kill Shaman, Zork's Tape Bruise is only the first release of the year outside their In The Red contract. In September, Captured Tracks too can boast an Oh Sees album in its catalog, the thoroughly enigmatic Dog Poison.

The opening salvo alone, entrusted to the farcical "The River Rushes", is enough to register a return to the unhinged, lolloping acoustic psych-folk of their early days, animated here by their now-customary weird outbursts (rancid flutes, little shrieks and falsettos), slightly anticipating the deranged flourishes of Castlemania. The sound is deliberately ramshackle, muddy, unwholesome, yet Dawson doesn't skip her own touches of refinement, even as her exhausted delicacy is reduced to a thin curlicue, a sprout forced to push its way through a dense layer of damp, filthy sonic topsoil. Unhinged, weighed down, routinely frayed by grotesque distortions, the four musicians from San Francisco produce yet another gallery of childish anti-anthems, playful little songs maliciously corrupted with the usual dose of bizarre alterations and a lo-fi sound back at good levels of sonic terrorism after those couple of, so to speak, more palatable records. There's always something unsettling lurking behind their idea of fun, or of summer, as the carefree little tunes of "Sugar Boat" and "Dead Energy" well demonstrate, enjoyable even in their hiccupping nonsensical drift. What's served up, then, is a collection of anomalous ballads that give off the stench of flowers already gone rotten, of colors altered by time, of systematic expressive sabotage. There's no calculation involved, though, and that alone is enough to spare the record the risks of mannerism and overly cunning posturing. Everything is dutifully brought back to a condition of unbridled horseplay, and from this vantage point even the ugliness and grime earn a (hard-won, it must be said) dignity of their own.
With flute and distortion often bursting in like little sprites, in a crackling undergrowth of absurd inventions, it's quite amusing never to be quite sure when Brigid is singing, and when instead you're hearing a feminine caricature sketched out by John. The band's naïveté, in short, is heading toward new and even more far-fetched goals, and the absence of filters lets Dwyer go exactly where he wants: a wasteland of decayed fantasies to roam through at will, with no maps or solid footholds to navigate by. The sinister evocations are quickly disguised by the playful cut given to them by the performers, that tone of an aberrant mechanical toy cobbled together from incoherent, strictly salvaged materials. This is what makes Dog Poison a pastiche of fragmentary stylistic references, an incongruous anthology of Frankenstein-songs, perhaps graceless beyond the acceptable but genuine in their own way. The impression, all things considered, is that the album remains a minor page in their discography nonetheless, far more fun for those who wrote or played it than for the listener forced to sit through it. A chapter apart, a conscious stopover in one of their unsettling funfairs, and therefore something other than a mere interlude: of such outlets, after all, Dwyer has never stopped needing.

Only a few months pass before Thee Oh Sees are back on track with a record of new material. Their incontinence in churning out new music nonstop has by now become proverbial, and there isn't a single piece written about them that fails to mention this detail alongside their (undeniable) reputation as stage beasts, one they've managed to earn in under three years. After The Master's Bedroom and Help, it doesn't seem unreasonable to hope for the technical knockout that would push their art to bolder heights, but their return to In The Red, Warm Slime, largely disappoints those expectations. Recorded live on an eight-track Tascam 388 in barely half a day, with the aim of replicating their live energy without adulteration, the album is literally dominated by the phantasmagoric opening entrusted to the title track, an emblematic show of delirium and strategic indifference that, with its thirteen-odd minutes of electric breakers, takes up the entire first side.
The label's lo-fi aesthetic doesn't dent a tone that's much more driven, adrenaline-fueled and headlong than usual, with a kind of anti-anthem that creeps in slyly and stays to ferment in your brain, a joyous mantra engineered as an ideal bridge between two noisy shores: one more conventional, the other geared toward the festive, croaking noise-fury that increasingly asserts itself as the band's true signature, all ringing echoes and reverb. And in this pleasant, foamy, stretched-out flow, an example of pacifist sonic terrorism open to the pleasure of improvisation, you get sucked in little by little without ever seeing it coming. The returning guest spot from Mike Donovan of fellow San Franciscans Sic Alps adds polish without upending this dizzying dive into the late sixties, which, all things considered, ends up sounding mostly like one long vacation.
What stands out in the rest of the record, a handful of three-minute-or-so songs, is a turn toward simplified songwriting and arrangements that rewards pure, no-frills rock sketch-work. Take "Castiatic Tackle", a fast, abrasive, rough-edged garage-punk cut in line with Dwyer at his best. Perhaps the new Thee Oh Sees pay a price in terms of overly schematic song structures and melody: the songwriting appears basic, pared to the bone and wrapped in a shell that's more direct than ever, without the odd flourishes that had made their previous, more overtly retro efforts so irresistible. It's in this rethink that the anomalous character of Warm Slime resides, in the will to do away with the retro-leaning delicacies hinted at in the pleasant little vignettes of Sucks Blood or Hounds of Foggy Notion, making room instead for vocals stripped of flourish and a temperament that's gone from tart to more blunt and mocking. Even the vitriol proves less deranged and more disciplined than in the days of The Master's Bedroom, only two years earlier at that. Songs like "Mega-Feast" are genuine hypotyposes, short, reckless, guitar-driven pieces that leave little room for imagination, while the color palette stays confined to the emaciated figures on the cover, which vaguely recall the celebrated firm of Klimt & Schiele. And you sorely miss Brigid Dawson's voice, limited here to the cadenced backing vocals of the militaristic "Everything Went Black": far too little for such a lethal weapon.
Granted, this isn't a complete betrayal, fans of the genre can rest easy. "Flash Bats", for instance, is a track even more submerged than usual, with John's voice buried under layers upon layers of dissonance, ragged feedback and a fair amount of sonic trash. Warm Slime's staying power is guaranteed by this systematic denial of neat form, balance and sonic norms. As in the case of "I Was Denied", where, despite a bubblegum melody cut with a hatchet, the sounds remain deliberately crude, prickly, and the production poor, unpolished. But beneath the flakes of lo-fi psychedelia, behind the scraps of rancid noise that bring this work close to the morbid Dwyer-ian solipsism of Dog Poison (with similar limitations too), a genuine, childlike pop spirit is confirmed, the ideal fuel to unleash, in one go, the full visionary force of their irreverence.

A Good Vintage Year

Barely five years after forming, Thee Oh Sees can already be considered a sure thing. Not content with the good work already done, the four of them choose 2011 to decisively up the ante: they intensify their efforts and send a full three new albums to press, the first of which is a double vinyl packed with castoffs and B-sides, Singles Collection Volume 1 and 2. The cover — two young men proudly showing off elements from the Master's Bedroom and Help artwork tattooed on their chests — says enough about the expressive horizons of a collection that's scattershot like never before. The first part, excellent, isn't actually unreleased material at all, having come out as a bonus CD rounding out the more reckless Zork's Tape Bruise a couple of years earlier. Compared to it, the second installment of this sort of mocking anti-greatest-hits immediately shows itself to be far more scattered, gathering up various oddities (like the tracheotomy-patient demo of "Contraption") and the usual punk-pop offal, charmingly lopsided, disharmonious, anything but essential. The band's berserk centrifuge keeps spinning at full tilt, sloppy, abrasive and seemingly going nowhere in particular, while the slapdash material (including the clattering, Garibaldi-esque embryo of "Blood In Your Hear") mostly just documents the exuberant cheerfulness of the Californian outfit during its extended downtime in the comfort zone. Stylistically uneven, the collection offers an atypical view of a band still blissfully unruly, bound by familiar formulas yet inclined to risk the occasional bizarre option (a good example is the thoroughly wrecked outburst "The Drag", certainly not easy to pigeonhole).
The strings, deep and funereal, rarely make an appearance ("I Agree", a decadent hybrid) in a decorative approach that recalls the enchanting band of their earliest days, one that would later be used sparingly but to good opportunistic effect. More characteristic, though, are the slow, gummed-up Oh Sees of the more grotesque, unwholesome pages ("7484"), whose pedalboards in advanced terminal decline attest to the raw, less accommodating bent of the anthology. A coarsening that spares not even the acoustic sketches (like "Castiatic Tackle") — sabotaged by their crude dress, stripped of rock's flesh as if to reveal the heart of their own madness — and that drowns under quintals of filthy distortion even the modest traces of acid-soaked Beatles scattered here and there ("Where People Do Drugs"). Certainly a good workout for Dwyer's scoundrelly weirdness, intermittently frivolous in his little songs built on falsettos and rascally flutes, though they fail to elevate mere curiosity to the rank of genuine interest. The standard holds at these shabby levels right up to the closing ballad, which keeps the same rancid aftertaste and doesn't escape the logic of what came before, confirming its inessential bent, suited mostly to diehard completists: solid proof of how the band evidently needs, every now and then, to surrender to the sleep of reason in order to release its darkest, most formless, most hallucinated monsters.

Between brighter and dimmer moments, Singles Collection Volume 1 and 2 makes clear once more, if there was still any need to, how the San Francisco quartet has no love for compromise and delivers superbly even in essentially throwaway interludes, where there's not the slightest chance, however remote, that they're working cynically to court any easy-listening passersby. The double compilation came out in April and implicitly functions as a teaser for the new record, released with full honors only a few weeks later. In fact, Thee Oh Sees, touring Europe during those same spring days, play none of the new songs and don't even bring along copies of their latest effort. If commercially the choice can only raise eyebrows, it nonetheless makes sense once placed in the operating logic of a band as naïve as few others right now. In case the many prior releases hadn't already made the point abundantly clear, Castlemania bursts in as an overwhelming demonstration that Thee Oh Sees are about as far removed as possible, within alternative rock, from the concepts of conformity and stasis. While in their early work the Californian outfit had won favor for a distinctive, recognizable style of their own (the collision of the guitars' lo-fi rough edges with the irresistible retro flourishes brought to the table by Brigid Dawson), before later landing, on records like Help, on a formula of reasonable compromise and heightened accessibility, this new album chooses to privilege Dwyer's genuine, uncontrolled passion, sacrificing every other variable in the process.

It's no coincidence. As already on Dog Poison and, later, on Putrifiers II, the volcanic frontman handles every detail of the record exclusively himself, singing and playing practically every instrument (guitars, bass, drums, percussion, keyboards, mellotron, synth, trumpet, clarinet, flutes and harmonica), while the other members' contributions remain marginal, with a couple of tracks given over to Dawson's voice and little or nothing for regulars Mike Shoun and Petey Dammit. While the lightweight noise-pop already sketched out repeatedly on the preceding Warm Slime is confirmed as the template, the spirit here is instead the combative one on display in less accommodating episodes like Zork's Tape Bruise or the aforementioned Dog Poison. Shared with those works is the tendency, here heightened, to cross surf-pop tropes with decayed garage sounds, relentlessly triggering kitsch short-circuits that are nothing short of disorienting ("Pleasure Blimps", "Whipping Continues"). It's precisely in the passages where easy-listening is adopted as a pretext, only to be duly upended by sloppiness and the grotesque, where sixties melodies are rerouted toward the most acid of nightmares ("Idea For Rubber Dog") or compromised by deliberately disturbing smears and inserts, where even country-blues detours are translated into black exorcisms ("AA Warm Breeze"), that one must look for the pleasure of a proposition as anomalous, naive and, deep down, genuinely carefree as this one. The press release dubs it, with admirable irony, a "Sunshine Pop Album", conveniently overlooking how Dwyer has always been a master at debasing and adulterating the pop core of every one of his creations.

Although acoustic textures are, for once, dominant, what leaves an indelible mark on Castlemania is their explosive crashing against the roaring, filthy electric cliff. The encounter takes on the shape of a joyously hysterical party, disorienting in its systematic disavowal of any expressive restraint, and it's plausible that behind unfiltered glimpses like these, booming two-minute-and-done blow-outs, the record Dwyer had had in mind for ages finally took shape: a fluttering, happily rancid album, stuffed with sinister nursery rhymes drowned in an atmosphere of general sonic sadism and tainted by a taste that's in its own way unsettling and childlike (exemplary in this regard are "Corprophagist" and the cover featuring the famous Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone). There's no shortage of clearer gems either, like the eccentric "Corrupted Coffin", a funereal pop song with a flowery, organ-driven melody heightened by flutes and trumpet, though the prize for most representative track has to go to the thoroughly sick number that lends the collection its title, an overexposed snapshot of the proudly chaotic Thee Oh Sees of 2011. Only toward the end is the deviance partly reined in, with a trio of covers — from little-known late-'60s artists: Norma Tanega, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band ("I Won't Hurt You", featuring friend Ty Segall) and the Dutch band Big Wheel — made more accessible now by Brigid's vocal contribution, now by a precious psychedelic veil in the style of "Magical Mystery Tour" ("If I Stay Too Long", the most Beatles-esque passage on the record).

Having filed away, with this sparkling (and unfortunately controversial) solo effort, their leader's whims, Thee Oh Sees arrive a few months later, with the double EP Carrion Crawler/ The Dream, at what is perhaps their happiest release ever. Bolstered by Lars Finberg of The Intelligence as second drummer and guitarist, the new recipe aims straight for a sound that's impulsive, detonating, relentless, and at the same time stable, organic and mature. The jolts running through these songs draw on both the great acts of rock's glorious lysergic past and the psychosis of the late '70s, distilling from the two a formidable middle path for new generations. "Carrion Crawler" opens (literally) the dance with a riff and a drive close to Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive": same suicidal propulsion, same unrelenting fury, a free-for-all that's maybe not quite as collective but equally unraveled in an acid-drenched sense. The solemn, reverb-drenched riff, the hymn-like vocal, the martial gait of "Robber Barons" are the ingredients of the latest find in noble psychedelic revivalism. "Chem Farmer" presents itself as a voiceless bacchanal, but one even more virulent in its flash-paper blues chords, wrapped in curtains of echo and channeled into tribal gallops.
"The Dream" tears down further frontiers. It's the most anthemic and motorik track in the collection. The cadenced, medieval-air-like vocal stands out phantasmagoric within a demonic jam, locked — as if under a curse — between stasis, neurotic hyperactivity and frenzied explosions.
Beneath its garage-rock crust, "Wrong Idea" is nothing but a seething harmonic joke, its unintelligible vocal doing little more than tracking its dynamic convolutions. "Crack In Your Eye" picks up where "The Dream" left off, opening with a shamanic-harmonica-like attack rendered through pure distortion, a gothic-ceremony beat and shrill vocal squeals. Expanding the already vast spectrum, "Contraption/Soul Desert" sends the B-52's flying back into orbit once more (a thoroughly new-wave orbit, sharp in a psychobilly sense), with an obsessive, ever more frenzied whirl. One of their most jaw-dropping creations. "Opposition" offers the only faint echo of their recent power-pop past, though here amped up with a hardcore edge. "Crushed Grass" is another fiery renewal of the Athens band's garage-wave, and "Heavy Doctor" sounds as though David Byrne were fronting a maximally acidified version of The Animals. Extreme qualities converge in this album-as-slingshot. The members and how they're deployed, for starters: Dwyer's guitar, Hendrix-like to the bone in its unsettling counterpoint, Dawson's vocals, Peter Dammit's atmospheric second guitar. Above all, applause is due to the rhythm section, the double drumming of Michael Shoun and Lars Finberg. But credit too for how deftly they navigate the genres closest to their hearts, those of "acid" San Francisco, historic and glorious, where they come from, mixed into poisonous blends that give rise to a strong new imagery. Like the one summed up by the cover image, drawn by Elzo.

Dedicated to the memory of friend Jay Reatard, of Jerry Fuchs and Gerard Smith, Carrion Crawler / The Dream remains an essential work, not only for the Oh Sees but for the entire Californian garage scene in the years straddling the last two decades.

The Last Flares

Anyone who feared overexposure was the most reckless of strategies, one Thee Oh Sees seemed to have accustomed us to, can finally relax. After an extraordinary 2011, rounded out by two albums of new material, a sprawling B-sides collection and the usual handful of bold collaborations, the San Francisco band seems to wisely opt for a more reserved approach: just one LP on record and a couple of minor split singles (with fellow travelers The Mallard and Quintron & Miss Pussycat). What doesn't waver, though, is both the actual quality of the material on offer, which remains comfortably among the most interesting around (despite the growing swarm of imitators, especially within the Castle Face family stable), and the pleasure in jokes and surprises that the Californian project has never stopped cultivating — in the case of Putrifiers II, through the misleading choice of a title that presents itself as the sequel to something that, in fact, doesn't exist (unless one gives weight to the identically titled song by The Yikes as a supposed precedent). To be honest, when it comes to Thee Oh Sees, a thread of continuity always seems evident: very few other outfits in the psych-rock scene of recent years can boast a sound as classic and recognizable as theirs by now.
Specifically on Putrifiers II — enriched by notable production as well as two luxury guests (Mikal Cronin on sax and Chris Woodhouse, who adds further substance and depth to a rhythm section that's phenomenal as ever) — the one-two punch placed at the start implicitly goes on to complete the (partial) turn taken by the substantial predecessor Carrion Crawler / The Dream, reaffirming that the trite affectations of lo-fi garage remain a variable the American outfit can easily do without. In the roaring launch of "Wax Face" all the band's stylistic trademarks (spirals of effects, electric hysteria, over-reverbed choruses and little shrieks) are superbly expressed, with a gift for synthesis and a sonic tightness that elsewhere, often, had been lacking. Likewise, "Hang A Picture" hits the mark squarely within their typical explorations between rock revivalism and sharp West Coast psychedelia: clear, precise, rounded, trotting along, and carrying more than one echo of the days of their first real hits, The Master's Bedroom and Help, not even five years old themselves, for that matter. Similar coordinates apply to the single "Lupine Dominus", an acid-soaked "My Sharona" that Brigid Dawson's sly little voice and the Fuzz War's roars turn into a sort of less jagged reworking of one of the best tracks in the Bay Area band's live repertoire, "Contraption/ Soul Desert". If on the surface their extremist streak seems toned down, at least compared with the more naive, less accommodating episodes in the Thee Oh Sees catalog, the subtle experimental vein that has always accompanied every one of their releases hasn't lost its shine — that taste for picking up a tradition and adulterating it at will through obsessive, recurring sonic channels, never-gratuitous distortions, peremptory rhythms and smoky digressions. Lopsided evolutions and noise for its own sake are thus kept to the bare minimum, but the band doesn't give up the tones somewhere between rancid and floral that have by now become its trademark.

In "Flood's New Light", for instance, they bring back traces of Castlemania's fluttering childlikeness, with just the right shadings and the festive nonchalance that are unmistakably house specialties. And, in the same vein, "Will We Be Scared?" brings back sixties beat, rigorously skewed in line with their own dazed temperament (not unlike their now thoroughly launched disciple Ty Segall), a bit like what happened with the delightful covers of genuinely obscure little songs that closed out that tart, ramshackle album. Guided by the inspiration of a John Dwyer who is, nonetheless, considerably less lighthearted than usual, the Oh Sees thus put together one of their most varied works ever, where the prize for biggest surprise rightfully goes to the dark, enveloping "So Nice", unusual for its martial composure and for the crucial role played by the cello, though no less disorienting than the rest of the lot. The title track, meanwhile, edges closer to Deerhunter's intimate art-rock and, caught between narcotic wonder and sudden flashes of illumination, could almost be mistaken for an outtake from "Halcyon Digest". The volcanic frontman then allows himself the luxury of yet another sly coup, unveiling a curiously airy track free of rough edges or disturbing devices, amid jangle-pop guitars, strings and crystal-clear vocals ("Goodbye Baby"), though there's also room for a tribute to the gentle, baroque psychedelia of Ray Davies' golden-era Kinks ("Wicked Park").

Even as they slow down to the bare minimum of one LP a year plus the inevitable extra round of 7-inches and 12-inches, the San Francisco band remains utterly faithful to the motto of striking while the iron is hot — a creed forged back when, not even ten years earlier, the whole enterprise was merely a side project of sole foreman John Dwyer and still went by the name OCS. While the Californian outfit's live activity has run uninterrupted for ages, their 2013 on record opens with the simultaneous release of the Moon Sick EP and what, by any reasonable count, should be their seventeenth album. After five releases with In The Red, a grateful John chooses to break free of the LA label and return to releasing through the family-run imprint. This Floating Coffin, it should be said right away, is a record built on consolidation. It dares a touch less than its three most immediate predecessors, but it does a fine job of fixing the lines of an already considerably distinctive style and sound, while managing to come across as cohesive as the band perhaps hasn't since the excellent The Master's Bedroom. Nothing new under the Bay sun, then, except for the terse but cryptic tag "darker and heavier" supplied by Castle Face's always-reliable press notes. The hint is spot on. Pleasingly sinister and crackling from the very start, the new songs win you over through an intense, ambiguous personality, while the pedalboards' relentless force renders all the menacing filth of their unmistakable electric charge as well as can be.

The usual powerhouse rhythm section, bolstered by Lars Finberg's second drum kit and Chris Woodhouse's percussion, helps give depth to an elusive, anguished, almost sepulchral lament, and it's from this dark, bubbling bed that the bandleader's fierce fuzz surfaces like the cruelest of rusty blades. It happens on "Night Crawler," already a replay of what's offered in the opening salvo, with the dense, magmatic backdrop sketched by Petey Dammit's roaring guitar serving as the perfect frame for Dwyer's scattershot backstage antics — all filtered yelps and acidic flashes — forever the absolute star of the show. The euphoric charge of opener "I Come From The Mountain" broadly replays the barrelling start of Putrifiers II, amid sonic whirlwinds and gullies of impressive density, while in the festive downpour of rough edges, noise debris and trilling vocal inserts of the title track, the band's frenzied six-strings bleed feedback like never before. Led by the cocky captain Dwyer, firmly at the helm, Oh Sees sound robust and possessed as expected, but also rather precise, striking a welcome compromise between devastation and reason. The joyous expressive swing of "No Spell" doubles down, alternating discipline and extremist flair, with the sound seeming to grow rounder and more measured only to overturn that premise with fresh, noisy eruptions. The band, in short, never fully gives in to the temptation of easy noise-rock drift: it prefers to use its head and wrap things up, perhaps, with elegant touches of effects, as in this case, or with a bizarre blend of its own quieter incarnation (think The Hounds Of Foggy Notion) and the crooked but fascinating vagueness of the Sonic Youth of "Murray Street".
Buried within an album that is bound to win the band plenty of new followers, you'll stumble on crisp, ringing riffs that seduce through a deceptive fluidity, a sly imitation of certain progressive (and even funk) standards, with the singer hamming it up mockingly and effectively shutting the door on yet another misleading comparison. These Thee Oh Sees have fun and sow confusion, in a way that's if anything even sneakier than before, with no overtly exposed tricks or clear-cut influences. And meanwhile, like skilled virtuosos in disguise, they absorb and hybridize, with their own deviant omnivorous mannerisms, over forty years of furious rock music. Thankfully, the lovable anomaly of that playful instinct hasn't been reabsorbed — the hysterical, childlike naïveté that has always stood as one of the boldest variables in the four Californians' deliberately crude toolkit. The cover art's delirium says it plainly, and "Strawberries 1+2" confirms it by analogy, a track that rears up, swerves and thrashes between near-punk raids, psych stretches, vital Cramps-style swells, and a gradual, inexorable slide into darkness, made all the sharper by Dammit's ever-impeccable interplay of shadows.
If the ease behind these well-worn formulas no longer makes headlines, what truly surprises, once again, are the unusual, disorienting contaminations. There's room for the regal return of Brigid Dawson and her wicked organ ("Sweets Helicopter") and for the giggly interlude that dusts off the more over-the-top moments of Warm Slime, complete with a lysergic guest spot on harpsichord from Kelley Stoltz ("Tunnel Time"). The closer, "Minotaur," is softer and less restless than average, following a lucid but provocative strain of psychedelia (echoed on the EP by "Candy Clock," a sort of Kinks detournement as performed by Syd Barrett) that has the air of a cunning spell. What makes it all particularly vibrant is the superb use of strings and the cleaned-up voices of the two singers, truly skilled at ensnaring the listener with what is only the latest — and perhaps the finest — of their Potemkin villages.

Thanks to Floating Coffin, 2013 is Thee Oh Sees' year of consecration, at least within alternative rock circles. As if that weren't enough, in November the American outfit releases, again on Castle Face, yet another grab bag of odds and ends, Singles Collection Volume 3. As much as, if not more than, in previous, similar outings, the vein proves unhinged and unstoppable, between raids as robust as they are childish and ramshackle demos, built on hissing Monks-style trimmings, thudding rhythms and sandpaper guitars. The record kicks off in the band's goofiest mode, with John playing the filthy little tempting devil in a silly, saccharine ditty — small potatoes next to the noisy rampage of terrorist blacksmiths that follows shortly after ("What You Need"), complete with the usual trappings of litanies, falsettos, roaring riffs and howls. A marginal, well-known variant, in short, of the house specialties, and no less enjoyable or powerful for it. A little further on, West Coast brilliance meets Oh Sees' childish irreverence in a genuinely terrific "Wait Let's Go," which smells of the late '60s but also of modern weirdness.
There are plenty of ringing, abrasive episodes in which the greater care taken with production (an aspect that has seen the band grow exponentially) doesn't soften the quintet's scorching, untamed impact, pleasantly brazen and delirious as ever. To understand the San Francisco outfit as it stands today, the joyous, retro-minded b-side "Devil Again" might say more than many words could: Oh Sees and the Farfisa make for a lethal combination in terms of carefree abandon and imbalance, especially with Dammit's electric cheese-grater and John's vinegar-soaked twelve-string running riot all around. Mr. Quintron's hallucinated boogie (already a comrade of the Oblivians) finds an unexpected second life in the affectionate reworking of "FBI2" — with the Californians drunk and over the top, just as the manic preacher-style delirium of the original demands — but the cover of early Sonic Youth's "Burning Spear" is no less convincing, schizoid and threatening in just the right measure. It's almost too easy to round out the tracklist with their battle anthem ("Block Of Ice," of course) in a performance on the friendly turf of the Eagle Tavern, and with the equally indispensable sonic storm of "Destroyed Fortress / No Spell."
Nothing new, then. But with formulas this well-honed, satisfaction is all but guaranteed, sight unseen.

Ellipses

Since last December, Thee Oh Sees have been a sleeping beast.
After more than five years flat out, a break was in the air. They announced it straight from the stage of the familiar Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, and in a sense it's a stretch to call it a cold shower. Some might even have suspected a prankster's joke on learning that a brand-new album was already slated for this April. But there are no mistakes or malice here. Drop has in fact been ready for several months now and, sooner or later, it had to come out; Brigid Dawson has left the Bay Area and settled in Santa Cruz, while John Dwyer has done the same in Los Angeles. That this isn't a genuine breakup so much as the need to pursue other things is made clear by some recent biographical notes: the frontman dusted off his earlier (and even more abrasive) band, Coachwhips, for a series of sweat-till-the-last-drop shows, but in the meantime he has also sent to print the vinyl of what — leaving aside the OCS-era beginnings and albums like Dog Poison and Castlemania, entirely his own doing — should be his first proper solo album.
Inside this Hubba Bubba, a synth-wave digression with often catatonic cadences, lies all of the American musician's passion for hypnagogic trinkets and assemblages of invertebrate sounds, strictly scavenged ones. So the record credited to Damaged Bug takes shape as a thoroughly faithful soundtrack to Dwyer-ian alienation, darker and far less carefree than its slapdash, nonchalant surface might suggest to a distracted listen. A collection of divertissements that, by design, can recall both the OCS's rambling solo explorations and the relaxed trash futility of some of his lesser projects like Zeigenbock Kopf, evident in the post-industrial autism of "Rope Burn" (redeemed, too, by its lovely rancid blooms). A decent sampler of oddities, then, deliberately arranged in a monotone, recurring key, with John's guitar limited to a few cameos that amount to the only residual Oh Sees scraps: at the start, with "Gloves For Garbage," a synthetic, homespun-flavored number stuffed with bizarre (but basically minimalist) moods and a mocking parody of certain cold-wave poses, it's the guitar that rouses things from the general lethargy; on "Sic Bay Surprise" it instead stirs up a still-sticky, dazed, teetering tangle, dominated by the same rhythmic clutter present everywhere else. These few clues are all you need to grasp the recreational aims of a little work recorded for pure fun; a considerable stylistic departure from our man's usual output, here geared toward radicalizing his own playful instincts into a product that comes across as deliberately (and flagrantly) cheap.

But Hubba Bubba is also a sick, claustrophobic record, as some murky episodes on the second side make eloquently clear: "1/2 An Aeroplane" in particular, a slow magma, a plastic effigy of despair, a cloud cover that doesn't let a single ray of sunlight through; not to mention the robotic suggestions that in "Metal Hand" push certain thirty-year-old retro-futurist clichés to the point of paroxysm, again in a morbid key and with worthwhile results. The sublimation of the house's delirium arrives, however, with the farewell track, a shambles with neither head nor tail that celebrates, through farce, the Californian musician's Dionysian creative vitality. Elsewhere, scraps of narcotized psychedelia poke through in unnatural, abnormal sunshine-pop molds, extended snapshots of a now-corrupted unease: an open game within the folds of "Hot Swells" but harder to decode in an "SS Cassidinea" that, amid a flurry of funny electronic trills, strikes more for its androgynous delivery in the vein of early solo Scott Weiland (compare it with "Desperation #5," from the deranged "12 Bar Blues") than for any spatial echoes of the Flaming Lips' "Embryonic". A bit further on, obsessions and ghosts seem to come alive like monstrous creatures from the ocean depths, lit up intermittently by their electric flickers in the dark. And those very same impressions are then stretched to the point of grotesque deformation in the track that lends the collection its title, paradoxically leaving John's voice with a clarity we'd almost given up hoping to find stitched onto it (which pairs with the slightly more conventional melodic clarity glimpsed in "Photograph").

Riding an inessentiality elevated to a guiding principle, Hubba Bubba deserves to be filed among the works that make no secret of their own marginality. Records that work purely as pressure valves for whoever puts them together. Weighed against that yardstick and the negligible expectations it generates, it can still offer the curious listener more than one enjoyable reward, provided — but this much is obvious — that the weirdness Dwyer brings to the table doesn't come with specific side effects for whoever lends it an ear.

And then, hiatus or no hiatus, here come Thee Oh Sees again.
Granted, from now on it won't be easy to greet with the same stony composure as before any booming announcement scattered to the four winds by John Dwyer's mischievous voice. Not just because of this latest prank of a record: has anyone ever seen a band on a reflective break casually book a healthy handful of festival dates for the coming summer? Obviously not, unless we're talking about a band that knows no day but April Fool's, endlessly drawn out and replayed. We were waiting for Drop as the only plausible answer regarding the fate of the Californian vandals. In vain, because any question about their future was beside the point from the start. So too was the fact of finding ourselves, once again, faced with a work by Dwyer alone (aided by the ever-reliable jack-of-all-trades Chris Woodhouse). And finally because this new record — forgive us, we lost count of the total tally of releases a while back — is genuinely sensational only in how systematically it dodges expectations, evasive almost out of sheer whim from the very opening bars of "Penetrating Eye."

All the better, in the end. Introduced by a hypnotic dirge, the usual fuzz howls entertain us with yet another dizzy, flickering little tune, a dense, mesmeric flow that tends to overflow and take over every available space like a colorful psych obsession. The following "Encrypted Bounce" trots along at a brisker but equally holiday-ish pace, bringing back the house's unmistakable female duet (with Greer McGettrick of "godchildren" The Mallard standing in for Brigid Dawson) within the framework of a new, eel-like exploration, redolent of sour, lumbering jams: tracks that are relaxed, in short, yet still recognizable, slithering about in their frayed motorik garb. Faint krautrock leanings offer a hint of method to these shapeless, autistic wanderings, but full expressive freedom remains an idol, a non-negotiable commandment for John. What emerges, then, is a record of retreat, called upon to decelerate rather abruptly after the great forward thrust of the band's latest releases, favoring a mood of breezy indolence instead. At the same time, certain ideas from Putrifiers II and Floating Coffin are nonetheless picked up and developed, proof that the San Francisco musician enjoys sticking to his own slow (but undeniable) evolutionary path. As had already happened on both of those records, "King's Nose" gives the mellotron a starring role and opens the door to a more pronounced baroque clarity.

Held up to the light, the chameleonic talent of an artist always at ease letting himself be infected by the past shines through, giving rise to grafts that may be bizarre but are always original. The same goes for the radiant, soothing Beatles-esque passage chosen for the closer, a mimetic rhetorical marvel (with horns courtesy of Mikal Cronin) whose dusty shreds of fantasy can't help but resemble the promise of a fresh start. Still, these remain delightful, lightweight escapes, as lofty as they are inessential, and that is the true bent of Drop. Hence the subtle Deerhunter echoes in another track, "Camera (Queer Sound)," which sweetens toward pop the American band's jagged psychedelic rock revivalism. And hence why the unruly enthusiasm of friend Ty Segall immediately comes to mind when you give in to the unusual lightness of the title track, with the sharp digressions of a cranky but expansive electric guitar. Not to mention the joke-turned-earworm of "Put Some Reverb On My Brother," a filler that dials down the tone to the point of becoming irritating.

The surprise, though, arrives a moment before the farewell. In its acid, Syd Barrett-style stretches, "Transparent World" easily wins the prize for the most hallucinated title of the bunch: still in placidly narcotic terms, as if in search of some lysergic peace that, at this point, might stand as the most credible sonic manifestation of the ellipsis behind which Thee Oh Sees have holed up, in their (fake?) hiding game. It's from here, in all likelihood, that they'll set off again once the time comes.

We'll never be so pedantic as to demand press releases certifying official lineup changes, but we would risk looking truly blind if we failed to notice that, over the last two years, Thee Oh Sees have shed their skin. That hiatus announcement, which landed like a bolt out of the blue the day after Floating Coffin, was cryptic indeed, and soon downgraded to a jokey bit of bravado once an album of new material was pushed as the clearest possible denial of it. Barely thirteen months have passed since then, but now we know for certain that the Californian vandals weren't kidding around at all. Our mistake, back then, was writing of an "immediate comeback," effectively ignoring how Drop was already something of a faded snapshot. At the time, the original band's diaspora was already underway, and, credits on that long-since-recorded album notwithstanding, three quarters of the group could be said to be on indefinite leave. The only one left standing at the helm was the commander himself, that John Dwyer who had migrated from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to amuse himself with side ventures and carry his own adventure forward on new tracks. Left behind in San Francisco and effectively retired were the formidable rhythm keepers Mike Shoun and Petey Dammitt, while Brigid Dawson's keyboard was scrapped (she now returns merely as a background voice) in favor of the lysergic implications of a mellotron played by Dwyer himself; the American outfit has been relaunched in the nimbler form of a trio, with some decisive structural adjustments, from the orthodoxy of an actual bass (replacing Dammitt's guitar, which was played as if it were one) to the retention of the double drums, his electric guitar as a totemic beast, and the all-around contributions of the ever-reliable Chris Woodhouse, effectively a co-producer. The real fresh start for the American outfit, then, arrives only now, with the seventeenth title in a sprawling discography, not counting compilations and short-form releases.

On the surface, nothing new under the sun: Mutilator Defeated At Last kicks off under the sign of a menacing calm, a long, wary build-up with the singer as a placid imp and his guitar that will, as things proceed, help itself to the usual exasperating license to scrape and claw. If the sound keeps leaning on the hefty psych sinews of recent releases, it's the essential lightness of the songwriting that makes the difference, in a quest for agility and nimbleness that trims away the overthinking and the ornamental frills to give freer rein to the band's loose-limbed vitalism. With a script built around pure garage-punk rampaging, a triumph of controlled but thoroughly enjoyable hysteria, the record celebrates a certain joyous, Dionysian exuberance while fleeing conceptual complications like the plague, and that holds true both for the darting "Poor Queen" and for a "Withered Hand" worthy of a standing ovation, complete with the inevitable electric howls and a bandleader in an exceedingly epic register. Having recently dusted off the Coachwhips chapter has evidently left more than one healthy mark, since these feel like the Oh Sees record that comes closest ever to that incredible band's battle-ready standard and lo-fi primitivism. More than the choruses from a returning Dawson, "Turned Out Light" sticks in the memory for its sweeping, overwhelming waves, which here nod to a certain elephantine seventies rock and, as usual, edge out by a comfortable margin the kindred Ty Segall of the past five years (Fuzz adventure included). The centrifuge keeps grinding away, the engine roars, the filters get duly clogged, but the mad John's filthy race car keeps tearing along undeterred, somewhere between a Led Zeppelin homage and the astonishing new rhythmic architectures built by Woodhouse and new recruit Nick Murray (who manages the minor feat of not making us miss Shoun). And all this in an exercise of self-quotation ("Lupine Ossuary," the deranged twin of the older "Lupine Dominus"), raw, bleeding, Cramps-indebted and as pointless as you like, yet thoroughly enjoyable not only for the most die-hard fans.

What we're left with, in short, is a pronounced leaning toward stylization, a simplification of the band's established codes that doesn't undercut the quality of the material but, for once, chooses to favor the skin, the almost physical pleasure of pure impact. An ending with a couple (tasty) too many fillers, spent on the anxiety of proving once again the outfit's versatile talent, enriches the stylistic palette still further. There's no shortage, for instance, of the usual clear, detoxifying acoustic-crystal passage ("Holy Smoke"), while the record closes along the lines of a loose, sketchy vignette that plays up the frontman's devilish stereotype and stomping childishness — the one from Castlemania, to be clear — yet cannily purged once more of the weirder digressions, as if unwilling to leave anything to chance or wild unpredictability ("Rogue Planet"). And John finally turns in a number that is even elegant, in how he doesn't hesitate to release woody, atmospheric touches in the shape of a dance that is, in its own way, sensual and elusive ("Palace Doctor"). Buried in the album's belly, in any case, is the most welcome of surprises. That lovably fragrant vein the band has often reserved for its more measured numbers gives its very best in a new gem, "Sticky Hulks," truly radiant in its balancing act, showing off a lovely vintage grain and the full recognizability of a trademark that, even so, never flattens into sterile necrophiliac revivalism clichés. What you sense instead is something hypnotic and liberating in this seemingly timeless dirge, though it's merely the latest trick up the sleeve of the unlikely Californian prodigy. By now, in any case, we can no longer claim to be surprised, and we simply welcome with pleasure every newly rediscovered alchemical trick from an outfit that has, by now and with real authority, joined the ranks of alternative rock's new classics. The experimental drive is still evident but stays more in the shadows, sacrificed in favor of fire and muscle.

What comes out of it is the band's most energetic record since the days of Carrion Crawler / The Dream. Not bad at all for what Mutilator Defeated At Last remains, to all intents and purposes, a transitional work.

Motorik catches fire

A second voyage of the Damaged Bug side-craft wasn't exactly on the cards, but amid an evident phase of creative transmutation for its pilot, John Dwyer, it must evidently have become necessary. Barely a year has passed since Hubba Bubba, the latest in an endless string of solo debuts from the San Francisco rocker, and his Castle Face label already has a sophomore effort ready to go, one far less reckless or disposable than that first episode, which we assumed was just a one-off (and self-referential) trinket. This time Dwyer's explorations are as playful and refined as those of Stereolab, with "Dots And Loops" serving as a bulky point of reference ("Grape Basement", "Transmute") alongside the more obvious Can and early Brian Eno (already openly cited, incidentally, on the cover of the previous work): fewer spineless jokes, then, less take-no-prisoners autism, and more fully realized transcriptions of his own songwriting, finally free, floating, sinuous and cyclical. The electronics of Cold Hot Plumbs draw motivational drive from both pop and kraut-rock, but it doesn't give up on stirring in the subtle psych unease that has made Thee Oh Sees such a reliable proposition, along with that bizarre and happily childish streak that for the Californian clearly remains an impulse he can't keep quiet.

As the single "Jet In Jungle" demonstrates, the tone has shifted from noir to light and carefree, with more structure and less sterile improvisation. In this way our man manages to speak with a genuinely new voice that sidesteps rigid genre constraints, without necessarily locking itself into the lo-fi synth-pop caricature one might expect from him, were he to indulge his boundless weirdness. The evocative passages that might recall his most famous creature are numerous and particularly convincing ("Der Mond", "The Frog"), amid atmospheric phrasing, lysergic break-ins (the radiant sunshine in the chorus of "Cough Pills"), robotic inflections that come across as endearing, and spacey drifts that, quite appropriately, never overdo it, maintaining instead a surprising balance of ideas. In this way the record manages to entertain and dispense all its freeze-dried fascinations at once, without sinking into the shabby farce of so many hypnagogic swaggerings, but also without ever taking itself too seriously.

From its very title, Cold Hot Plumbs reveals itself as an album with a weakness for antinomies, albeit tastefully harmonized, steering clear of noisy solutions and putting to good use a fine arsenal of vintage effects, gurgles and burbles, liquid, rubbery, crackling sounds. The original garage is transfigured into a woozy recoding that smacks of playful futurism, at times infatuated with a recycled funky aesthetic, more often with a genial minimalism made of endless onomatopoeic modulations. It's just a moment of recreation set against the uninterrupted tour de force of his main outfit. But it's easy to warm to, and in the future we might even find, who knows, that we don't want to do without it anymore.

That goes doubly for the veteran, collective project. Even if a fully settled shape is one they'll probably never take on, the metamorphosis of Thee Oh Sees that we've been chronicling for some time now can in a sense be said to be complete. Recorded by the by-now indispensable Chris Woodhouse, who with his percussion, guitar and organ contributions effectively acts as a secret director and additional member of the group, the eighteenth chapter of their recording saga, A Weird Exits, is also the first collection of new material with the new rhythm section, already in use live for the past eighteen months (you can hear it on the band's first genuine live album, "Live In San Francisco", released in early summer), and made up of the two drummers Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon, alongside Sic Alps bassist Tim "Hecubus" Hellman. The opening one-two punch comes across as a decent frontal assault, with special mention for the granite wall of "Ticklish Warrior", which finds the bandleader hollering his lungs out before succumbing to the pitch-black sonic chaos of his electric guitar and the shockwaves of the double rhythmic reactor. The opener, for its part, recalls rather the heavy hitters of Hawkwind-worshipping emulation, with a sound even more muscular than an already remarkable average, and a chorus that seems to cannibalize the Lenny Kravitz of his golden years. So far no expressive anomalies worth noting, but the surprise, evidently, is waiting just around the corner.

As the title suggests, the gateway of the instrumental "Jammed Entrance" amounts to entry into a different dimension, one it isn't inappropriate to call a prog-psych-rock recoding of the electronic spirals and kraut weaves of the frontman's most recent effort under the Damaged Bug name: a pocket-sized odyssey, serenely hallucinated, through the bizarre recesses of the Californian author's mind, made comfortable by the soft channels shaped by synth and lit up intermittently by his tortuous guitar flare-ups. Another very clear point of contact with Cold Hot Plumbs is the artwork, courtesy of musician and visual artist Robert Beatty (already the creator of some Tame Impala, Neon Indian and Real Estate covers), whose seventies-flavoured suggestions amplify the mesmeric potential of a record that's surprisingly fluid and elegant, one that smacks of free revivalist dissertation—elephantine, as in several of the Californian's recent productions—but thoroughly enjoyable all the same. In "Plastic Plant" this near-motorik aesthetic is pushed to its extreme consequences, and the debts owed to Can's kosmik-rock (to "Mother Sky" in particular) become extremely heavy, if openly acknowledged. Dwyer the singer, elsewhere absent for long stretches, here proves his qualities with an insinuating, placidly malevolent manner. And while "Unwrap The Fiend Pt. 2" is another unsung, cyclically structured track, only with a more aggressive, darting groove (in line with an established canon by now), the furious spin-cycle of "Gelatinous Cube" recalls instead the vicious punk incarnation of Coachwhips, with a certain visionary hard-rock rhetoric standing in for the noise-sadism of the original.

The two episodes most oriented toward psychedelia claim the last quarter hour for themselves and visibly slow the revolutions, with guest appearances from a resurrected Brigid Dawson and cello courtesy of friends The Mallard's Greer McGettrick. Launched toward the space-rock stratosphere to hypnotically bear witness to the sublime alienation of an author who no longer seems to have much left to prove, the Thee Oh Sees craft orbits skillfully around the dark side of the moon ("The Axis") before catching fire and crashing back to Earth in ruin.

Even when you think you've finally got him figured out, the ineffable John Dwyer manages to surprise and reveal some detail about himself that no one suspected. That he could be a worthy patron and talent scout is a relatively recent discovery. At the helm of the increasingly convincing Castle Face, he has signed and promoted at least a couple of high-profile outfits, the excellent synth-punk of fellow San Franciscans Pow! over the past couple of years, and the thoroughly ragged garage of Detroit's Mountains and Rainbows just a few months ago. It took, however, a full nineteen albums credited to his most successful creature before we could also discover his philanthropic virtues, given that half the profits from the new An Odd Entrances have, on his own initiative, been donated to an organization that works with the homeless in Pasadena.

Just three months on from A Weird Exits, here then is yet another chapter in a recording saga that seems to know no slowdowns or hesitations of any kind in its relentless march, even when what's at stake is a simple minor release that, by its authors' own explicit admission, amounts to a full-blown extension of its direct predecessor or, if you prefer, a brief "cosmic exercise en plein air" (only a little longer in the limited edition, which comes with the seven-inch of the unreleased, and no less flickering, "Classic Bananas"). That the two records should be understood as fraternal twins is a given. The sessions are the same, recorded by Chris Woodhouse at his Dock Studio in Sacramento, as is the lineup made up of Hellman, Rincon, Moutinho (who just a few days ago announced his departure for personal reasons) and Woodhouse himself, with Mallard's Greer McGettrick lending cello and Brigid Dawson reduced mostly to a motivational role (the liner notes credit her with backing vocals, tea supplies and spiritual support). If to a cover once again designed by the much-in-demand Robert Beatty we add the clear cross-references between the two collections' oddball titles, and between certain tracks on one and the other, outlining symmetries devoid of any certain direction ("Jammed Exit" closes the circle opened by "Jammed Entrance", "Unwrap The Fiend, Pt. 1" should logically be the prequel to "Unwrap The Fiend, Pt. 2"), the game should by now be out in the open.

With Thee Oh Sees the sonic climate always leans at least a little toward the menacing and the simmering. Dwyer's guitar remains a formidable beacon in the dark, especially in the prog, space and psych-rock digressions of this compendium-appendix. "You Will Find It Here" finds the bandleader playing the sorcerer with evident relish, the sibylline vocalizing reduced to a terse ceremonial garnish, while the electric mantra unwinds inexorably between orderly but looming rhythms and the occasional pleasant cameo from the by-now indispensable Dwyer-esque toy, a floral little organ that reeks of the early seventies. "The Poem" gives free rein to the group's more baroque, polished streak, inevitably sacrificed on the previous release. Harmony, composure and dusty psychedelic languor show they have nothing to envy in performers celebrated today in those very same territories, from Jacco Gardner to Balduin to Doug Tuttle, proof that the Californians can be just as credible when they aren't indulging in pure sonic terrorism or feral rock primitivism. The playful aims of the operation also find expression in the delightful escape of "At The End, On The Stairs", a refined variation on the weird-childish theme of the unruly Castlemania, of which it appears a sister, still eccentric but far more composed.

The trademark stampedes still come across as toned and muscular, but for once they appear more serene, without the frothing-at-the-mouth quality of so many live performances, though they don't deny themselves the pleasure of drifting off little by little. The setting is, as per the band's usual repertoire, lush but sinister, and on "Jammed Exit" they indulge in a reconnaissance as futile as it is relaxed, trying to give body, even in a non-electronic version, to the recurring kraut weaves already profitably explored on the two Damaged Bug records. A stylistic exercise as curious as it is marginal and, in the end, also deliberately dispensable. To find some fuzzy grit you have to get to the last and most hallucinated jam, "Nervous Tech (Nah John)"—loosely inspired by Miles Davis's "Go Ahead John"—in which John's guitar tantrums remain, incidentally, just a few harmless flare-ups, kept within unusually disciplined bounds by his standards. What's mimicked here is the breath and beating heart of a beast that has, evidently, chosen to rest after the countless feral rampages of the past.

Meanwhile, at the start of 2017, the solo adventure strikes its third blow. With the numerical tally now roughly even against Thee Oh Sees over the last three years, insisting on considering the Damaged Bug moniker just an occasional diversion would, at this point, be short-sighted. In confirmation of this, it's also worth flagging the minor releases that have begun to pad out the catalogue, from the recent split shared with Brian Chippendale aka Black Pus on Famous Class, to the fantastic seven-inch mantra of "Smoggy Terminus", complete with a tarot deck by artist Kyle Ranson. Still, it's worth noting how, in his solo output, John Dwyer has ended up drawing ever closer to the aesthetic of his main project, with growing concessions to the grumbling of that acidic, malevolent, cancerous guitar, and to a little voice that's simply unmistakable (the title track, "Bog Dash", the fabulous near-garage litany of "Unmanned Scanner"), all within a framework of experimentalism that remains, as ever, bizarre, childlike, recreational.

Bunker Funk presses on mostly along the comfortable path laid out by its predecessor, amid tasty noise-making, subtle atmospheric disturbances, loops, synthetic gurgles, pre-packaged rhythm tracks, fifes, whistles, wheezing bellows ("Liquid Desert"), robotic obsessions (which on "Slay The Priest" partly echo the industrial radicalism of Zeigenbock Kopf, before then blossoming into unexpected sunshine flourishes), alongside John's syrupy vocalizing in the ecstasy of his strange sonic laboratory. In this way, Dwyer the singer gradually comes to the fore, broad margins of orthodoxy are recovered—the mournful ballad "Mood Slime", with its soft dreaminess, sounds especially emblematic—and the impression of a more well-rounded album is reinforced. The thicket of chirping electro evocations on "Ugly Gamma" and its angelic vocal performance shouldn't be misleading. What the Californian has set to music here is only the latest in an endless parade of futurist nightmares, in a perspective that the church organ simply renders more dazzling and luminous. A result immediately matched by "Rick's Jummy", with its claustrophobic, cyclical psychedelia that plays up the kraut-rock aspirations already widely explored, above all on "Hubba Bubba". The dose is upped further by the thoroughly deranged nursery rhyme of "Gimme Tamanthum", the peak of our man's childish drift, while his playful streak reaches its height with the pleasant divertissement "No One Notice The Fly", bedroom progressive that wouldn't have looked out of place in the childlike circus of "Castlemania", as well as the collection's only instrumental alongside the heavenly fragment of "Heavy Cathedral". What's perhaps missing is the formidable surprise factor of "Cold Hot Plumbs", but its expressive contradictions are preserved, and the album easily confirms itself as a pleasant alien trinket. And then, for once, John has chosen a photographic cover, something that hadn't happened since the days of Coachwhips, a lifetime ago. Whether that means anything at all, in any case, remains to be seen.

A single step's head start is evidently no longer enough, so John Dwyer decides to get ahead of the game at double speed. There's barely time to unveil his group's brand new effort, complete with name change to Oh Sees (sacrificing the Thee that had meanwhile become too trendy), before we're blindsided by the mischievous announcement of an upcoming autumn release and yet another change of corporate name, this time a return to when, in a remote but not-too-distant past, this project hid behind the acronym OCS (Orinoka Crash Suite, Orange County Sound, or whatever you prefer). With all the lineup updates it's getting hard to keep count, so we'll limit ourselves to noting the arrival of Paul Quattrone of !!! in place of Ryan Moutinho as second drummer, and yet another reinstatement of Brigid Dawson on backing vocals, while the rest of a monstrous rhythm section (Dan Rincon and Tim Hellman) is confirmed, alongside the trusty Robert Beatty for the artwork. Missing from the roll call, however, is Chris Woodhouse in the producer's chair, replaced by a brand-new quartet made up of the frontman, his friend Ty Segall, Enrique Tena and Eric Bauer (already at work this year with Meatbodies on "Alice").

It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that all this buzzing operational fervour should find more than one echo in expressive terms within Orc and its lead single "The Static God" especially, a peremptory return to the festive garage-rock schizophrenia of the most classic Oh Sees, with that roaring gallop built on red-hot sheet metal, tangles of fuzz, channels, childlike little voices, choruses and ulcerated or celestial hypotyposes, depending on the case. A general impression then corroborated by the darting, street-smart "Nite Expo", a robust transcription of the playful gospel of the Damaged Bug side-project, only carried out with killer electric guitars in place of the keyboards and homespun electronics of that diversion. Astride his crackling creature, Dwyer shows himself as determined as he hasn't appeared in a long while, bolstered by a lethal sonic impact that nonetheless doesn't intend to sweep away that taste for detours and sonic lightening so characteristic of the Californians' recent work. All without ever interrupting the torrential, bubbling sonic flow, now sly, now ferocious, always menacing. If more than one echo of the unsurpassed Carrion Crawler can be heard, the most notable difference lies in the drums, less diesel-powered pounding and more an instrument of eclectic, virtuoso improvisation that never hits blindly. So too the long and at times piercing digression of "Jettisoned", entrusted to a smooth-talking Dwyer's voice, a melodious bass and six strings that sound like chainsaws, bets more on decorative flourish than on the raw, naked fury of times past.

"Keys To The Castle", for its part, sounds almost like one of those demented nursery rhymes the bandleader seems particularly fond of, only to then get tangled up in the usual venomous frontal assaults and the howls of that unmistakable guitar, or else driven mad into a dead end of alienation, amid jams slowed to the point of paroxysm and etno-spacey touches that lull the piece to sleep with real mastery. Side two, though, goes back to favouring the quartet's elephantine progressive streak, heightened by a certain baroque vein with a whiff of musical necrophilia that, by now, has clearly become one of the band's indispensable trademarks. Once again, for all the limitations of such an expressive mission, there's no denying the results are sumptuous and deeply fascinating. Submerged and almost translucent, "Paranoise" brings back kraut temptations of the Can variety, stretching the fabric of the song as if still banking on the appeal of old-school hypnosis (just listen to the rarefied atmosphere framing the drum dialogue on the closing track). Even in these quieter moments the record is skilfully unsettled at a subterranean level, betraying a restlessness - unless, as in "Cooling Tower", the band opts for a stylization close to sunshine-pop purely for the pleasure of toying with an easy-listening refrain worth carving in stone. "Drowned Beast" is a beast drowning in an exhausted gentleness harking back to the late sixties, over a narcotic rhythm and under a wash of reverb behind which the hand of good old Ty can only be hiding.

What emerges, then, even more than in the past, is a remarkable compendium of the dwyerian art - as hazy and sprawling as you like, but also an impressive collection of shapeless psych-rock frescoes, sketched the way only this incredible band can pull off these days. The usual pleasantly inessential songs, left to drift, but with just enough eccentric personality thrown in to make them memorable after all.

John Dwyer's 2017 closes on a note of self-celebration. Twenty years of activity for his favourite creation - restless and ever-evolving as always - coincide with its twentieth official full-length release (not counting the countless rarities compilations), as well as with the hundredth catalogue number for the family label, Castle Face. Everything would seem to point to something special, even though the recent Orc already seems to have said it all on that front, and rather brilliantly too. So the volcanic frontman opts for a different strategy, with yet another change of name, paired with an unexpected return to the days when the band was called OCS and was nothing more than a whim, conceived specifically to unwind from the exertions of the Coachwhips. For the occasion, the original line-up is dusted off, with trusty Brigid Dawson back on vocals and keyboards and the resurrected Patrick Mullins on percussion, alongside decorative contributions from Heather Lockie (strings) and Mikal Cronin (horns). Melodious, seductive duets, evoking a pastoral scene around a campfire, set the tone for an elusive little opus that updates the formula of those early works with a whole different level of technical and expressive command. That's the case in the woodland carousel that closes the set, with "The Chopping Block" immersing itself in late-sixties British folk, or when, in the grooves of "Neighbor To None", Mullins' musical saw resurfaces to sketch the elegiac soft focus of those now-distant experiments - a peaceful refuge made of arcadian suggestions, somewhere to return to for a brief leave of absence from reverb, diesel compressors and the sonic excesses of a revised and corrected prog-rock.
The track lending its title to the collection even edges towards a polished country-folk, and that alone should say a lot about the diversionary nature of this work.

Memory Of A Cut Off Head is an inessential but mature record, almost entirely freed of the usual baroque flourishes and freak extravagances (limited to the odd oddball acceleration or minimal borrowings from lysergic Beatles), but also a collection of delightful exercises in style, in some cases ("Cannibal Planet") geared towards transcribing the recurring textures of the beloved Damaged Bug side-project into a more visionary and consistently graceful form. The synthetic re-creation of that collateral project pokes through here and there with subtle, gurgling inserts, without ever really shifting the album's balance. There are also livelier passages, in line with the floral vignettes that, however much a minority option, Thee Oh Sees have never failed to dispense in recent years ("On And On Corridor", which even manages to evoke the less jagged side of Primus). One of the album's gems is the ephebic baroque-pop pearl "The Remote Viewer", which, carried along by its fine harpsichord, confidently settles into Canterbury-revival territory, somewhere near Jacco Gardner, Balduin and Doug Tuttle. Dwyer is keen to show how much he's grown, not just as a songwriter but as a craftsman/arranger too, yet it's often Brigid who surprises most, especially on side two, carving out small starring roles marked by psych-folk transparency, a grace as elegant as it is bloodless: within a celestial atmosphere that sweeps away all background noise while still failing to silence a tone of melancholy ("The Fool"), or in a kind of sputtering autism ("Time Tuner").

Granted, the whole operation, skilled as it is at disguising its own aestheticizing nature, is a bit of a trifle in the end. Given the almost feral style typical of the flotilla captained by Dwyer, a result this airy is bound to feel alienating, at least for some listeners. All that remains now is to figure out whether this is just a momentary detour, as we suspect, or whether it foreshadows something genuinely new on the horizon. As always, when it comes to John Dwyer, it won't take long before we get an answer.

And indeed, we'd been all too easy prophets. Unequivocal proof arrives in the summer of 2018 with the gang's annual dispatch on Castle Face, Smote Reverser, the twenty-first chapter in a discography that has so far been almost flawless. One way to raise the stakes, now that the album has been fully absorbed, would be to predict the long-fantasized collaboration between the undisputed leader of the Californians and Ty Segall as imminent, since never before have the developments and untainted nature of their music shown such precious parallels. With the crew of technicians from Orc almost entirely confirmed - the only change being the Laguna Beach golden boy replaced by Mario Ramirez (formerly of Swans and Brand New) alongside the trusty Enrique Tena Padilla and Eric Bauer - the big news this time around is the addition of Froth keyboardist Tomas Dolas, practically the band's fifth member, along with the switch from cover artist Robert Beatty to a graphic designer more oriented towards pulp sci-fi, Matthew Stawicki, so as to rein in the prog impulses of the music while still accommodating its occasional proto-metal flare-ups.
The cocky, ramshackle garage sound of the early days is a very distant memory, but dwyerian psychedelic rock has also evolved profoundly, opening up to cross-contamination and leaving ever more significant room for improvisation. The band now looks like a beast moving massively at uneven speeds, alternating fairly stripped-down rough edges, tortuous magmatic drifts and progressive labyrinths that are, to their credit, never banally prone to bloat or to necrophilia as revivalism for its own sake. John delights in methodical, recurring constructions only to then translate (and betray) them into the usual untamed, straightforwardly rock-driven raids, drawing maximum momentum from this only-apparent contradiction. Enriching a sound that remains as granite-hard and sharp as ever is, this time, Dolas's organ, elevated for long stretches to co-star status, though far removed from the floral, almost caricature-lysergic tones Brigid Dawson used to bring in the old days - she's still present, but confined to backing vocals. Judging by what you hear on "Enrique El Cobrador", it seems more accurate to talk of a backbone, the innervation of a record that sounds far less guitar-driven and savage than its predecessors, while on the level of rhythmic and percussive maximalism it refuses to give up anything at all. Not that Dwyer's creature necessarily abdicates heaviness - quite the opposite. The explorations feel more carefree and playful than ever ("C", the airy filler "Flies Bump Against the Glass"), and the fizzy seventies groove courtesy of the keyboards marks a comeback compared to the past, entirely played in a spirit of lightness (the same spirit that drives the bandleader in his by-now essential outings under the moniker Damaged Bug).
The noisy monoliths built from terrorist assaults worthy of the old Coachwhips punk days aren't missing either - as proven by the lead single "Overthrown" and the thunderous eloquence of "Abysmal Urn", where the frontman rediscovers all the brilliance of his trademark style - but the hard-and-pure variant remains a minority option, a tasty diversion magnificently delivered by the ruthless Rincon/Quattrone pairing behind the snares. Likewise, yesterday's baroque flourishes survive within "Moon Bog", in that irreducible eccentricity - hazy as you like, yet unfailingly stimulating in its vitality, caught between fragile calligraphy, a sturdy muscular tone and the ever-present, sparkling showmanship. Another example comes from the (supposedly) slowed-down psych-hypnotic "Last Peace", ostentatiously atmospheric and tart à la Bevis Frond, especially in the way it lets itself be twisted by kraut-style redundancies and space-rock hyperbole. Inevitably more frayed and sprawling is the new monster, "Anthemic Aggressor", a close relative of the solo project's domestic nightmares, yet not without its own coherence within the overall design: just another face, perhaps the most flamboyant one, of the uncontainable expressive freedom animating all of Dwyer's recent output, frayed (and at times self-indulgent) to excess, but at bottom always exquisitely personal.

No sooner has a calendar year gone by than fourteen new tracks arrive, packed into a mammoth double album, Face Stabber, released in August 2019. Deviant psychedelia, as usual, laced with acid trips and prog detours. Music to travel with the mind and shake with the body, which starts off almost under the radar, on the notes of "The Daily Heavy", only to spill into the long, hyper-lysergic jam "Henchlock", over twenty-one minutes of psych-rock omnipotence. Another jam arrives halfway through, in the 14 minutes of "Scutum & Scorpius", which heads straight towards a batch of blatantly progressive ideas, firmly in Emerson Lake & Palmer / King Crimson territory. But Face Stabber is also lightning-fast raids, able to hit the listener in under two flat minutes, with the imperious proto-metal accelerations of "Gholu" and "Heartworm". The derailing opening of "The Experimenter" is pure magic, a crazed, deeply sick funk, a stone's throw from Italian crime-movie soundtracks, with uncontainable guitars turning the title track into a powerful instrumental, a healthy jolt of energy, and jazzy influences are always lurking just around the corner, drawing on the teachings of geniuses like Frank Zappa and Weather Report, thanks to which "Fu Xi" takes on the shape of an unstoppable musical flow.
Between granite riffs and hyper-powerful rhythms ("S.S. Luker's Mom"), Oh Sees confirm themselves as a band alien to this world whenever they manage to condense their statement ("Together Tomorrow" manages to say it all in a minute and a half: take a bow), but a couple of passages remain that would have deserved a firm trim, as in the case of "Captain Loosley", which objectively adds nothing to the economy of this eighty-odd-minute record, monumental and structurally complex in its own way. Face Stabber represents the new chapter in a career as remarkable as few others in the world in terms of sheer prolificacy. Compared to Ty Segall and King Gizzard, John Dwyer and company share the same stylistic vision and guarantee the added value of a hyperactivity that (almost) never comes at the expense of a very high average quality, but they set themselves apart through a greater underlying coherence, one that never tips over into obsessive repetitiveness. Dwyer's creatures have collectively reached 22 albums in as many years of activity - something truly monstrous. Every record seems to be the definitive one, and Face Stabber undoubtedly stands among the very best.

John Dwyer, in short, doesn't renounce his fondness for form and gigantism, aesthetic prerogatives that only the originality of his songwriting and the untamed freedom of his genius manage to turn into points of genuine interest. The sound is spectacular without ever feeling contrived, the whirlwind mixing spares nothing, the showmanship remains visionary yet complicit, and the virtuosic temptations are kept in check by an always-appropriate grubbiness. Wavering and elusive, bristly and brutal, at times even aestheticizing, Oh Sees deliver with Face Stabber yet another bastard gem of an extraordinarily prolific and consistent career, at least in terms of guarantees delivered - one more bead on a rosary of eclectic, hugely enjoyable albums.

Dwyer's 2020 project goes by the name Bent Arcana, an ensemble of musicians with uncommon technical chops brought together for five days of lysergic improvisations built around cosmic psychedelia and free jazz as core themes. The highlights of those sessions are collected on Bent Arcana, the first chapter of the new saga, in which the mastermind behind Thee Oh Sees enlisted the modular synths of Kyp Malone of TV On The Radio, drums and percussion from in-demand session player Ryan Sawyer, the bass of Peter Kerlin of Sunwatchers, the saxophones of Brad Caulkins and Joce Soubiran, the keyboards of Tom Dolas, the guitar of Marcos Rodriguez, the violin of Laena "Geronimo" Myers-Ionita and the percussion of Andres Renteria.
What emerges is a very 1970s psych-jazz trip, entirely instrumental, with kosmische-kraut, prog and fusion elements. It might sound like the introduction to a heavy, hard-to-digest work, but Dwyer deserves credit for selecting the standout moments, distilling virtuosic flourishes steeped in electricity, chewed over through noise interference ("Misanthrope Gets Lunch") and interstellar surges somehow contained within a song format ("Outré Sorcellerie"). The long jam sessions are condensed into the supremely elegant "The Gate", a genuine gateway into the Bent Arcana universe, and into the magnetic groove of "Oblivion Sigil", the only two tracks that venture - without ever becoming tedious - past the ten-minute mark.
For Dwyer this amounts to a (super-)group therapy session, through which he can lean on the inspiration of extraordinary fellow travellers without necessarily having to wear the mantle of charismatic leader. A free-form project that ideally brings together Miles Davis and Sun Ra with Faust and Can, but with the exploits of Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report in mind, never claiming to compete with the boundless, unreachable greatness of the originals taken as reference points. The first chapter of some stimulating astral hypotheses: we await news of any further developments.

2020 is also the year of Protean Threat, released between the end of summer and the start of autumn under the Osees moniker. In the sound of this album, the impulse to let go clashes once again with a barely-concealed refinement of sounds and melodies, of genres that pierce through the psychotic fabric of the songs, steering them in new and unexplored directions each time. Once you get past the steamrolling fury of "Scramble Suit II", with a double-drum firepower that evokes Melvins, things actually get even more interesting. The range of solutions on offer is wider than usual, running from the blazing stride of "Upbeat Ritual", which seems intent on lighting up the darkness of night in flashes, to the soul-lounge echoes of "Said the Shovel", a sort of space-time portal opened onto the 1970s that in some way pairs with the pulp atmospheres of "Red Study". The same goes for the disguised blues of "If I Had My Way", in some ways the last thing we'd have expected to find on this record.
More muscular episodes still hold their ground, like the punk shard "Dreary Nonsense", the near-heavy gallop of "Terminal Jape" and the weird one of "Canopnr '74", and then the psych-rock marches "Mizmuth" and "Toadstool", which lend that disorienting sense of feeling "at home" within Dwyer's catalogue. Needless to say, there's no catching your breath until the very last note, with a "Persuaders Up!" that in fact goes right back to pushing things at breakneck speed, but if there's a moral to be drawn from "Protean Threat" it's that Thee Oh Sees haven't given up on the eclectic nature of their sound - if anything, they've decided to lean into it even harder. The end result, though, never changes - and never disappoints.

A few weeks later comes Metamorphosed, five songs with runtimes at opposite extremes (under two minutes for the opening tracks, long suites for the closing ones). Truthfully, though, it's still the wild, unhinged fragments that entertain us most, as with the opener "Saignant" and the following "Electric War", two steamrolling tracks that reveal the heavy side of Dwyer and co. Even "Weird and Wasted Connection", with its less brutal tones, doesn't fail to trap the listener in its instrumental vortex. A title like "The Virologist", for that matter, even seems to connect with today's reality: and here we thought Osees - or Thee Oh Sees, in their more "orthodox" guise - were completely detached from the real world. The job of showing Dwyer's more visionary side falls to the 23 minutes of "I Got a Lot", here engaged in a sort of tribal rite under the effect of hallucinogens.

The third - and final - record released by Osees (they decided to go by that name in the year of the pandemic) in 2020 is Panther Rotate. Presented as a remix album of the excellent Protean Threat, of which it's also an anagram, it is in fact a sequence of overly cerebral tinkering that adds no value and no improvement to songs that remain far more effective in their original versions. Seven alternative takes, obtained by reworking certain tracks, stripping out the fuzzed-out guitars and piling on heavy doses of electronics and ambient noise, undermine much of the visionary power the band is capable of delivering.
An experimental work (every reworked track has the word "Experiment" in its title) and a daring one, built on kraut-school repetitions, ambient drones, psychedelic deliriums and Zappa-esque detours. A bit like taking the hallucinated drifts of Radiohead's "Kid A" era and mixing them with the lysergic paranoia of Pink Floyd's Barrett era, but within Oh Sees' sprawling discography it remains, inevitably, a superfluous chapter, for completists only, with few moments worth noting. Take "Toadstool Experiment" - nowhere near a distant relative of the gripping "Toadstool" - or check how little of the firepower of "Scramble Suit II" is reflected at all in "Scramble Experiment". Not even the only two unreleased tracks (the narcotizing "Synthesis" and "Poem 2") stand out for their impact. With all the affection in the world, someone really ought to let Dwyer know it's not strictly necessary to release every single thing that pops into his head in the recording studio!

2021 opens with what is, to all intents and purposes, a brand-new development: for the first time, John Dwyer steps out under his own name... John Dwyer, although joining him on this - yet another - adventure are musicians Ted Byrne, Greg Coates, Tom Dolas and Brad Caulkins. The eight tracks (26 minutes in total) of Endless Garbage are nothing more than chaotic free-jazz fusion sketches, so fragmentary as to come across as deconstructed despite the dominant presence of the drums. If the goal is to represent chaos and disorientation, perhaps interpreted in relation to the reality and the times we're living through (though, knowing him, we'd be inclined to doubt it), then we might even concede the mission has been accomplished. The tracks move without direction, like a jam session to which each musician involved wanted to add an element disconnected from the others. Even when there seems to be a glimmer of coherent sense, as in "No Flutter", everything dissolves into a shapeless, uncoordinated mush.
To be clear, all of this is absolutely deliberate, we'd even say crafted with intent. But that's exactly the point: the ostentation of excess, of illogic, of militant extremism can work perfectly well, as long as the listener can take something away from it too. From this "endless garbage", however, it seems hard to extract anything good - an emotion, a spark, anything at all, even disgust, as long as it sticks.

Not that things change much by year's end. With Gong Splat, good old Dwyer once again surrounds himself with musicians, this time drummer Ryan Sawyer, Greg Coates (double bass), Wilder Zoby (synth) and Andres Renteria (percussion).
If Endless Garbage was a jumble of fairly short sketches, Gong Splat unfolds across nine tracks of varying length, generally more substantial and therefore also heavier. This is obviously not the place to go looking for traces of song form. Still, the peculiarity of these tracks is that they have no form whatsoever, as well demonstrated by the nine minutes of "Yuggoth Travel Agency", devoid of structure, of any build, and we'd say of ideas to sustain them too. Things fare a little better, it must be said, with the record's other "boulder", titled "Toagut", where at least the sensation of being left suspended in the void of infinite space, right at the close, seems to give meaning and purpose to what's just been heard, chiming with the imagery evoked by the following "Anther Dust".
Acidic phrasing, rhythms essentially twisted back on themselves, spacey sketches provide just enough sense to call this a psych-rock work, but the label alone isn't enough to shake off a boredom that comes galloping in regardless.

After taking a year off in 2021 (something that had never happened before in the band's history), though Dwyer still kept busy with his series of impro projects (Bent Arcana, Witch Egg, Gong Splat, Moon Drenched and Endless Garbage), Osees return with their twenty-sixth album, the apocalyptic A Foul Form (2022), whose seeds had already been planted on the previous Protean Threat: there, certain tracks ("Dreary Nonsense", "Terminal Jape", "Scramble Suite", "Persuaders Up!") already hinted at direct influences from 80s hardcore and skate-punk. Influences that Dwyer himself cites for A Foul Form: Bad Brains and Black Flag above all, not to mention synth-punk (Screamers), European punk (Abwärts) and English anarcho-punk (Crass and Rudimentary Peni).
Having tossed aside the prog toolkit of Face Stabber and Metamorphosed (where the up-tempo tracks were still plentiful, mind you), Dwyer and co. dive headfirst into a personal tribute to hardcore, punk and noise. Recorded in Dwyer's home studio, strictly lo-fi, A Foul Form could be described as a return to his roots (the nostalgic tone of the liner notes points in that direction), if it weren't for the fact that back in the 90s Dwyer was making noise music, not punk: even so, with half the band having grown up with a foot in the Bay Area hardcore scene (Dan Rincon and Tim Hellman), Dwyer manages to produce one of the most brutal and credible albums of his entire musical life, even if the suspicion that it's really a highly successful stylistic exercise is never far away.
Far from the noise deliriums of Netmen and Pink&Brown and from the gunk-punk of the Coachwhips, the Osees of "A Foul Form" have their roots in the 80s but their head turned towards the future: with such a distinctive line-up (two drum kits, guitar, bass and keyboards - in the garage-punk world, the only act to ever field a line-up quite like that was the Piranhas), hardcore-punk cross-breeds with electronic junk ("A Burden Snared"), proto-metal lashings ("Funeral Solution"), noise debris ("A Foul Form") and darkwave currents ("Too Late For Suicide"), setting the style for the punk of the year 3000.

Thematically, Osees are far removed from the social critique of British anarcho-punk: like good Americans, they entertain a generic anti-authoritarianism and an insurrectionism that does nothing but reinforce the message that the world is a brutal, violent place which must, one way or another, be answered in kind. Late capitalism breeds monsters, and don't expect solutions or theorizing from Osees: all they tell you is that, for now, you just fight. And that's no small thing.

Every year Osees release enough music to fuel entire underground scenes, and the real paradox is that they rarely seem to repeat themselves. In recent years we've watched them turn into proto-metal warriors, synth-punk fanatics, hardcore saboteurs and noise mercenaries, but OFF COURSE (2026) makes an even more surprising move: it slows the frontal assault and returns to something freer, more organic, almost accidental. This record was born out of reworked jam sessions, and you can feel it immediately. There's no writing involved, no precise map - it was a discovery made along a cosmic path, rediscovering the pleasure of error, drift and deviation.
The title track opens the record like a transmission from space: the first guitars evoke the cosmic ghosts of "Astronomy Domine" by Pink Floyd, but the track soon shifts shape. Melodies emerge and vanish like mirages, while the double drums of Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone build a kind of hypnotic highway that keeps pushing forward regardless of everything else. And this is exactly where the heart of the album lies: for once, Dwyer isn't really the main character. Tim Hellman's bass and the constant dialogue between the two drummers become the true narrative engine of the record. Their rhythms, deeply indebted to both kraut-rock and afrobeat pulses, create an almost physical sensation of perpetual motion.
"Hecate's Reflection Is A Trick" is probably the aesthetic manifesto of the whole project: metallic bells, psychedelic organs, multiplying percussion, and vocals reduced to a rhythmic element. "OFF COURSE" reaches states of trance rarely explored by recent Osees, along with something deeply playful - a quality that on the band's latest records had often been sacrificed on the altar of sonic aggression and speed. Even the closer, "The Brute On His Knees", comes across almost as a provocation: a long, organ-dominated epilogue that looks simultaneously to British progressive rock, psychedelic garage and a certain gothic melancholy.
While some contemporary psychedelic acts use the jam as an aesthetic, here Osees use it as a method of exploration. John Dwyer and co. seem to remind us that some of the most interesting discoveries happen when you stop asking yourself where you're going and start following the groove.

Contributions by Michele Saran ("Carrion Crawler/The Dream"), Claudio Lancia ("Face Stabber", "Bent Arcana", "Panther Rotate"), Fabio Guastalla ("Metamorphosed", "Protean Threat", "Endless Garbage", "Gong Splat"), Ruben Gavilli ("A Foul Form"), Ljós Berinn ("OFF COURSE")

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