I Like Thee Oh Sees.

Although it passed me by when it first appeared last year, ‘The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In’, debut LP from Thee Oh Sees, John Dwyer’s latest assault on the world’s sensibilities, has recently come back outta nowhere (or “the internet” as we call it these days) to claim a place as one of my, like, totally favourite things of recent months.

(I know they’ve got a new album out on (where else?) In The Red soon and/or now, but I’ve not heard it yet, so for now I’ll keep on talking about their old one if that’s alright with everyone.)

Like many others I suspect, I’ve been a bit hot/cold on Dwyer’s previous bands, as experienced via the garage/noise of The Coachwhips and the noise/noise of Pink & Brown. Listening to both of those groups, I felt a mixture of respect for Dwyer’s pure energy in honing in on exactly the kind of demented, unconventional sound he was after, and disappointment that the results were often so chaotic, inconsistent and self-sabotaging. With Thee Oh Sees though, he’s shifted focus quite a bit, playing to his sonic strengths and really hitting the jackpot, letting loose a beautifully skewed mess of jangling psychedelic rock n’ roll, resurrecting the spirit of the earliest 13th Floor Elevators material and splicing in strains of mutant rockabilly and contemporary noise-rock thunder, equal parts melody and chaos over a relentless party-time backbeat, nailing an absolute killer sound.

Perhaps ironically for a band with it’s roots in San Francisco, Thee Oh Sees sometimes seem to be aiming at an ideal of psychedelia that draws a direct line between basic, backwoods rock n’ roll and total whacked out strangeness, writing the unnecessary baggage of the British invasion, folk-rock and hippie blues-jam phases out of history entirely. The sound of weird, sub-beatnik kids sticking forks in their third eyes back when everybody else was still wearing matching stripy shirts and playing ‘Louie Louie’. Barring the odd Townshend-derived riff, tambourine and some faint ‘we-listened-to-Dylan-on-acid-and-it-was-awesome’ Elevators-esque folk vibes, a lot of these Oh Sees songs sound like some kinda freaky thing that might have been birthed had the boys down at Link’s three-track shack just thrown caution to the wind and got waaaay out there one night.

A good dose of Dwyer’s lunatic-with-a-megaphone distorted vocals have survived from Coachwhips, but here they’re translated for the human race by co-vocalist Brigid Dawson, the two voices more often than not coalescing into an uncanny, genderless alien howl, framing a seemingly endless series of deliciously strange psych-pop readymades and surfy Monks/Seeds groove-stomps. You probably won’t get any terribly deep lyrical sartori from this Oh Sees album, but the odd snatch of vocab and titles like “Ghost In The Trees” and “Graveyard Drug Party” combine with the juggernaut of sound to tell you everything you need to know about the kind of scene being explored here.

Everything in Thee Oh Sees world comes served via an overdriven tube amp roar, slathered in slapback echo and tremolo. Almost every song jumps into life from a swamp of murky, delayed clatter, a ubiquitous “1,2,3,4!” sounding like it’s being beamed in from a distant ham radio, before the frantic rhythm section lays down the law and Dwyer’s applaudably demented, wild man guitar-playing proceeds to steal the show, slicing his way through Troggs-worthy hulk riffs, twangy jack-in-the-box rock n’ roll leads, pure destructo noise and endless fried solos with all the restraint of a kid on xmas morning.

For all the nerve-rattling racket though, these tracks are always accompanied by a tune to write home about, a pre-verbal yellalong chorus and the kind of honest-to-god crowd-pleasing hooks that most straight-laced garage bands would die for. Opener “Block Of Ice” and definitive dilated pupil girl-ode “Maria Stacks” present the band at their pop-est, like some inexplicably amazing two minute epiphanies you might find buried deep on a ‘Psychedelic Experience’ comp or ‘Pebbles Vol#36’, and proceed to obsess over for years. Longer groove-based cuts like “Two Drummers Disappear” sound like they have their root in some absolute killer rehearsal jams - ones that were WORTH KEEPING, would you believe - and even the more abstract items, such as the perplexing “Visit Colonel”, featuring as it does a roar of sound that makes me fear I’m about to be run down by a train every time I play in on my earphones, still rope in a melody I could probably hum for you, had I not let all the other competing Oh Sees melodies bounce happily around my brain for so long.

Across this album’s whole forty something minutes, only penultimate track “Quadrospazzed” begins to lose focus and run out of steam, and the closing “Koka Kola Jingle” makes up for it, a beautifully wasted, barely there lament, hinting at an entirely different aspect to the band’s music, before ending proceedings, as is only right & proper, with a resigned, echo-wrecked guitar drop/plug pull. Sadly you’ll have to add in the closing footsteps leaving the recording booth yourself, but no matter, ‘The Master’s Bedroom..’ still evidences a plain fantastic hit-rate for music this essentially spontaneous and crazed.

Thee Oh Sees is timeless, damaged freak music of a kind that’ll have 70 year old weirdos chortling for joy and 20 year old squares turning pale and reaching for the pause button. This one stands alongside those Greg Ashley solo discs, Oneida, Dead Meadow, Animal Collective and The Heads ‘Undersided’ on the long-list of my favourite psych-rock albums of the decade.

Mp3s>

Maria Stacks
Two Drummers Disappear


Thee Oh Sees myspace.

Buy this album from Norman.

Download some rare Oh Sees singles from the increasingly unbeatable Pukekos.

Labels: garage, I like, Psychedelia, punk, Thee Oh Sees