Thee Oh Sees: Castlemania (2011)

Thee Oh Sees son una de esas bandas con las que es difícil llevar una cuenta exacta de cuántos Lp´s llevan grabados por no hablar de los innumerables singles, 7″ y Ep´s. Tremendamente prolíficos a la par que bastante irregulares, la banda liderada por John Dwyer son expertos en salirse de las normas establecidas y de las etiquetas comerciales imperantes en el momento. No siguen ninguna regla ni queremos que las sigan. Facturan un Pop-Garajero con influencias Nuggets y de lo más primitivo de la música de la década de los sesenta. Para este Castlemania han elegido una vía intermedia. A los aires garajeros de siempre hay que unirles los temas más soleados. Parece como si Thee Oh Sees se hubieran impregnado de esa ola de revivalismo surfista-veraniego-Sunshine-Pop que nos inunda, pero tomada desde la vertiente Ty Segall, no desde la de, por ejemplo, Best Coast. El propio Dwyer ha definido el disco como “summer-y and poppy”En Castlemania florecen auténticos temas Pop de alto quilataje: Corrupted Coffin, I need seed, Pleasure bimp, Blood on the deck, Corprophagist, Warm breeze, If I stay too long… donde a un cierto cambio de actitud positiva se une una ampliación en el espectro musical (melotrones, armónicas, flautas, teclados aparecen por el disco con total naturalidad desconocida hasta ahora), dándole al conjunto un aire más fresco, y ahí es donde las brisas playeras aparecen en su totalidad.
Pero Thee Oh Sees no son una banda corriente, y su vena Nugget no iba a desaparecer así como así. El Pop de ascendencia garajera y aristas chirriantes está siempre omnipresente (Stinking cloud, A wall, a century; Spider cider, Castlemania, AA Warm breeze, If I stay too long, Idea for a rubber dog…). Todo ello aderezado con versiones de gentes como The Creation, hacen de este Castlemania un disco diverso, divertido, algo irregular pero cargado de momentos interesantes. En definitiva, la definición perfecta de Thee Oh Sees.

Thee Oh Sees – Castlemania (2011)

“Over the past decade, San Francisco’s Thee Oh Sees have morphed from a showcase for skronk-savant John Dwyer’s sensitive side into the hardest working band in garage-rock. Their output is prolific and their live show combustible. But on Castlemania, Dwyer opts to go it alone. With the exception of live-band regular Brigid Dawson– who, along with the Sandwitches’ Heidi Alexander, contributes some backing vocals– the shaggy-banged songwriter handles almost all of the instruments. Drummer Mike Shoun and Guitarist Petey Dammit aren’t out of the picture permanently. They’re just off-duty until the fall, when Thee Oh Sees are scheduled to release yet another full-length record.
Castlemania is a fairly introspective affair, at least by Oh Sees standards. It’s Dywer’s most melodious batch of songs since 2006′s mostly acoustic Cool Death of the Island Raiders. Without the heavy full-band artillery he leans toward skewed bubble-gum pop, fleshing out the guitars and drums with flutes, bells and thrift store synths. It was recorded, at least in part, at Dywer’s former group house. “This here is the last record worked on at 608c Haight Street in San Francisco (very near and dear to my heart and heavy in my memories) before control was assumed by rich assholes,” he writes in the liner notes.
Not that this is Thee Oh Sees’ answer to Nebraska. Even at his most reflective, Dwyer’s songwriting retains a sinister, “Sesame Street”-on-LSD sensibility– simple melodies and creepy lyrics, frequently delivered in a whacked-out monster-voice. “It don’t feel too good to be dead in the 21st century/ I am dirt but I can be/ A home for wayward hungry seeds,” Dwyer growls on “I Need Seed“, deploying a Looney Tunes-worthy narrative in a song about death. It’s summery retro nuggets pinned into the red, shot through with a healthy dose of drugs and dread, while “Pleasure Blimps” finds him singing of machines stripping away flesh over shimmering glockenspiel lines and 12-string guitars.
All in all, Castlemania is a fairly loose and scattered record. There are plenty of oddball tangents, including a stripped-down and spooky cover of West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s “I Won’t Hurt You” and the forlorn mellotron and sax instrumental, “The Horse Was Lost”. Songs frequently melt down into racket rather than stop on a dime. But it’s good to hear Dwyer step away from his backing band’s big guns, if only for a moment” (pitchfork.com)

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Thee Oh Sees/Ty Segall: Crushed grass/Happy creeps (Split Single, 2011)

 

Si a mí me llegan a decir cuando me casé que el crucero de mi viaje de novios sería a bordo de un barco en el que tocaran Thee Oh Sees y Ty Segall evidentemente, me lo hubiera pensado todavía menos de lo que me pensé entonces. Porque parece ser que existen unos promotores que han ideado un viaje Miami-Bahamas en el que tocarán bandas del calibre de las mencionadas, Vivian Girls, The Black Lips, Surfer Blood, Strange Boys o Turbo Fruits. Impresionante la gozada que puede ser disfrutar de tus vacaciones con bandas como éstas tocando todas las noches. El primer viaje está programado para finales de Febrero. Una avezada discográfica ha editado este single compartido (se está imponiendo esta moda últimamente) entre Thee Oh Sees y Ty Segall. Los temas son evidentemente, incendiarios cortes del mejor Rock de Garaje a baja intensidad. Súper recomendable. Yeah!!

Thee Oh Sees/Ty Segall – Crushed grass/Happy creeps (Split Single, 2011)

“By now you have more than likely caught wind of the Bruise Cruise, the hipster-tinged Mayercraft conceived by former San Francisco resident and Panache Booking founder Michelle Cable. Featuring live sets from some of the best in the garage rock scene – The Black Lips, Vivian Girls, Surfer Blood, Turbo Fruits and much more – the party ship is scheduled to sail from Miami to the Bahamas and back over three days in late February. In honor of the inaugural voyage, Memphis-based tastemakers Goner Records today announced the release of a limited edition split 7″ featuring none other than Bruise Cruise performers and San Francisco garage rock favorites Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. We expect the single run print to go fast, so be sure to snag it while you still have a chance. And for the diehards, Bruise Cruise passes can still be had for $500 + fees, commemorative 7″ included. Hundreds of drunk garage rock fanatics mixed with 2,000 shuffle board playing family vacationers — what could go wrong!” (thefeast.com)

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Thee Oh Sees: Warm slime (from Warm Slime, 2010)

Thee Oh Sees: Warm slime (2010)

 

Seguirle la pista discográfica a la banda de John Dwyer es una tarea ímproba que nos llevaría a partirnos las sienes desentricando los numerosos singles, Ep´s y largos que la banda ha ido diseminando a lo largo de su carrera por diversos sellos. En su MySpace hay un breve intento inconcluso. Lo que sí es cierto es que este larga duración (me niego a llamarlo Ep), Warm Slime (2010), es su última producción. Otra constante de su producción es una cierta falta de consistencia y de regularidad en su sonido. Ésta última premisa tampoco se cumple con Warm Slime, ya que se trata de todo un disco, con buena producción y con la idea de perdurar como una verdadera obra musical. Se trata de un buen álbum en sí mismo, con dos partes bien diferenciadas: Una primera parte (cara A) ocupada por su In a gadda da vida particular: Warm Slime, el tema que da título al disco, una larga jam de trece minutos largos en la que el cuarteto da rienda suelta a todo su repertorio de filias y fobias que los han acompañado durante su carrera: los sonidos garajeros, los Nuggets, el Noise, el Lo-Fi, el Psycho-Pop… engarzados y reproducidos en los casi catorce minutos de intenso sonido. El resto del disco (cara B) sí que funcionaría más o menos como uno de sus numerosos Ep´s: cierta unidad sonora compilada en una breve colección de temas. Éstos se inician con I was denied, una especie de oda surfera con huella garajera muy divertida. Everything went black es un tema que tiene una impronta más garajera, a lo Question Marks. Castiatic tackle es otro número de Garaje-Pop a lo Cramps muy intenso. Sus ecos, mezclados con los de unos Jesus and Mary Chain, por lo que de ritmo cansino y un tanto plomizo, aparecen también en Flash Bats. Mega-feast es el tema más flojito de la colección, una especie de pastiche sonoro con ritmo desenfrenado. MT Work cierra el disco de forma divertida, uniendo Surf, Lo-Fi y Garaje a partes casi iguales, algo así a lo que realizan Beach Fossils en muchos de sus temas. Un álbum más que recomendable éste de Thee Oh Sees, que en contraposición a muchos de sus discos anteriores, en los que salvábamos uno o dos temas, en Warm Slime nos encontramos con una enérgica colección de temas de lo más atrayentes y atractivos.

Thee Oh Sees – Warm Slime (2010)

“Working with Thee Oh Sees front-man John Dwyer must be something of a double-edged sword for musicians. On the one hand, band members must be rubbing their hands gleefully at the prospect of another pay-day (not that bands this size ever really make any real profit, of course). On the other hand, their leader cranks out so much material that he must have them working – if not in the studio then playing live – seven days a week. Since 1997, Dwyer has fronted or played in at least a dozen bands, most notably Pink And Brown, Coachwhips and the Hospitals, and his latest release, Warm Slime, will be the eleventh full-length album to fall under the umbrella of Thee Oh Sees project. His band-mates must consider him a pretty hard task-master. 
Not surprisingly for a writer churning out tracks at such a prolific rate, quality control is not always of the same standard, but Dwyer has steadily honed his craft since the early, home-recorded OCS releases. To this end, Warm Slime can be seen as an improvement on last year’s Help, and arguably Dwyer’s best work to date. The album is split into two halves: the first is dedicated to the fourteen minute long (!) title track, with six shorter songs on the B-side. ‘Warm Slime’ (the song) is, as you might expect from it’s length, something of a monster; starting off as a relatively straightforward garage-rock jam, it gradually mutates into something more akin to twelve-bar blues, then a Creedence-style country-blues jam, then into a call-and-response gospel-type affair. By the end of the track, it’s throbbing bass and stark rhythmic pulse has hinted at a sort of minimalist kosmische, and finished up as some swampy, voodoo psychedelia. Suffice to say it’s a heavy trip but, amazingly, every second of it’s playing time is justified.
The album’s second half feels like an EP-length song cycle in itself. The insanely catchy ‘I Was Denied’, with its hollered “la-la-la” chorus, is an infectious cross between the sleek rock ‘n’ roll of Love As Laughter, and the Banana Splits theme. The eerie, 60s-aping ‘Everything Went Black’ stomps along on the back of a martial drumbeat and features some all-too-brief moments of guitar/keyboard interplay, before the band switch to breakneck punk mode for the bratty rattle of ‘Castiatic Tackle’. The spectres of Suicide and the Cramps hang over the droning ‘Flash Bats’, which fades in as if we’ve interrupted some particularly intense, Oneida-like psych jam. ‘Mega Feast’ is the album’s only real throwaway track, a discordant mess of detuned guitars zipping aimlessly over metronomic drums, before ‘MT Work’ brings us back full-circle with another raucous chant-along. It ends on a drum fill that sounds like a perfect lead-in to another track, and it’s tempting to wonder if maybe ‘Warm Slime’ was originally intended as the record’s epic closer; if perhaps the vinyl came back from the pressing plant with the labels printed on the wrong sides and Dwyer just thought “Ah, fuck it”. Most likely, though, it’s an intentional inversion of convention, a typically perverse gesture and a fitting end to a wonderfully sick album” (thequietus.com)

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Thee Oh Sees: Guilded cunt

Thee Oh Sees: In the shadow of the giant (7"-2009), SubPop / Help (2009), In the Red

Thee Oh Sees son una banda del área de San Francisco que este año han publicado -que yo sepa- un par de discos. Éste es uno de ellos, In the shadow of the giant, un single de tres canciones editado por SubPop en el que la banda del inquieto John Dwyer se mueve a sus anchas por las aguas del Pop-Folk-Psicodélico más o menos friki y pseudo experimental. Tres temas que son algo así como si The Mamas and The Papas o The Beach Boys se corrieran una juerga utilizando instrumentos acústicos y subidos de sustancias lisérgicas y la grabaran en plan Lo-Fi. No está mal si tenemos en cuenta estos precedentes y no los juzgamos por sus valores musicales. Diversión y experimentación Lo-Fi a partes iguales para un grupo que igual te graba estos temas más acústicos que te realizan un viaje Retro hacia sonidos más garajeros y cercanos a las sonoridades de Link Wray. Te acompaño igualmente el link de su álbum Help, también de 2009:

“Tight” isn’t a word that fits comfortably when describing Thee Oh Sees, but on Help, the second full-length effort from John Dwyer‘s garage psych marauders, the band has certainly learned to find order amidst chaos in a manner that eluded them on their 2008 debut The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In. The basic approach on Help isn’t particularly different than on Thee Oh Sees’ first effort — the guitars are thick, ringing, and dripping with reverb and distortion, the rhythm section pounds away in a simple but relentless fashion, the massed vocals approximate vintage California-style harmonies in the midst of a trip on dirty acid, and the songs take traditional garage rock changes and bend them a wee bit as the production runs them through just enough low-budget studio trickery until they resemble a paisley nightmare oozing out of your speakers. Still, while most of the tunes on Help sound as purposefully messed up as ever, they’re just a bit tidier and more straightforward here, and the stronger framework makes a positive difference. Similarly, the performances sound more unified and less chaotic here, as if everyone is following the same vision that lurks over the horizon for a change, and the ferocity of Dwyer‘s guitar is potent, locking into the crash-boom-bang of the bass and drums with impressive force. And while full-on assaults on reality like “Enemy Destruct” and “Soda St. #1” are the order of the day on Help, there’s enough of a pop lilt in “Go Meet the Seed” and “Can You See?” to confirm these folks saw some real nice colors while making this album and have a variety of tricks in their repertoire to express them. You might not trust Thee Oh Sees to give you a ride home after a gig, but if you’re looking for a seriously buzzy rave-up, Help certainly delivers the goods” (allmusic.com)
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	Thee Oh Sees – Tidal Wave
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