The first foray into Thee Oh Sees was when they were OCS and the album was elaborately titled OCS 3 + 4 (Songs About Death And Dying Vol. 3 / Get Stoved). It was an exciting mess that kept finding its way onto the stereo, each time the process of deciphering more acute, more absurd. The San Francisco band made noise, and there was no special code to be had.
Now OCS is Thee Oh Sees (an outlet for John Dwyer of the Coachwhips, Yikes, and Burmese to release home recordings, now evolved into full-time band), the archaic possessive pronoun a humorous indicator of the band’s ascension into clearer-mindedness. On the new album from Narnack Records, Dog Poison, they’re less overtly messy, but just as exciting, the jangly piano keys and crashing percussion elements filled with broken pomp, as though The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society went awry in its earliest recording sessions. They are precisely the type of noise-rock band to ape and mock jangly, hazy-eyed guitar rock to affective ends. There is a faint connection to the Kinks, as described, some to garage rock progenitors Sonic Youth (particularly the would-be single “The Voice In The Mirror”), but Dog Poison actually mimics very little from the canon. It’s cohesive; it knows what it wants to do whether that is coarse, male/female vocal interplay on “The Sun Goes All Around” or video game-like sounds, mixed with flute and piccolo “I Can’t Pay You To Disappear.” Whatever it is, it all works out.
As the track “Dead Energy” bounces to an end, the brief nine-song record fades, then fizzles and cuts out. It amounts to hardly more than twenty minutes, hardly an EP by traditional recording standards. However, it’s another blissful slurry from Dwyer’s childhood imagination, fraught with enough adult indulgences to beg the listener’s continued anticipation.
|