WORDS Brian Carroll IMAGE Castle Face Records, Drop Album
A relief for music lovers: “Drop,” the new album from demo-vehicle-turned-punky-five-piece-garage-band Thee Oh Sees doesn’t belong here, not now. Scrappy, unoppressed, leaking not the faintest hint of worry, the popular and prolific San Fransisco group is doing something refreshing in branching out to attract pop audiences, but will probably be systematically ignored anyway. Shame.
While we as a culture seem to try our best to embrace the little bands, the indie pop/rock hybrids that aren’t out to blow up the world, when one actually comes along in the musical shark tank that is today’s music market, it’s easy to feel they’re already doomed for not being born as aggressive, simplistic, or just plain Photoshopped as their major label peers. Ah, well. Their loss, our gain.
Generously creative, “Drop” is packed with nasty electric guitars, goes for “dark cute” a lot, employs fuzzy noodling, and rather than make the sort of glossy statements we come to expect from pop/rock bands in the now, pings a new radar echo in the now-distant lineage of non-threatening, lo-fi psych throwback bands of the Nineties like TFUL282 or Olivia Tremor Control – bands that one could say got lost in the shuffle after Dave Fridmann went “all MIDI.” It’s difficult to describe the exact vein of psychedelia Thee Oh Sees combine with garage here without mentioning those relatively obscure pop-psych artists, the type of kaliedoscopic bands that could conceivably conjure images of lysergic 2AM recording sessions, kitchen sink instrumental jams, Can, Bowie, and Bobby Beausoleil sleeves strewn about and used as pot trays in a hazy, dark, west-coast basement lit by the primary-colored LCDs of esoteric gadgets.
The band’s default “tiny powerhouse” garage sound still overrides any psych-pop autopilot that often takes over records like this, but where garage as a genre can come off as foolishly unrealistic, musically dundering, or too-cool, Thee Oh Sees do a wonderful job of demonstrating how to remove the blinders of their genre, dipping their toes in the alien ponds of wah pedals, leslie vibrato, vocoders, harpsichords, and cellos by exploring these chamber pop staples through pre-punk influences. “Drop” speaks in a language their own people can understand via the deft tight-roping of warmth and character in singers John Dwyer and Brigid Dawson’s vocal deliveries. Whereas a band like Foxygen might get too much of a kick at poking fun of their own trappings, and conversely the Tame Impala family of bands may be too frigid or Beatles-esque to be considered very worthy additions for the genre faithful, Thee Oh Sees here offer the perfect amount of sincerity and playfulness with little regard for the (ironically) rigid rules of the genre.
The first track, “Penetrating Eye,” opens mysteriously with an ancient, Haack and Silver Apples-era synth lead and a spring reverb crackle before the fuzzy, stinky Sabbath riff soufflé that is the song proper plops a wicked purple deuce in your ears. It’s a good opening track, not because it serves as a perfect introduction, but because it’s weird and nasty. I love it when bands put a bouncer at the door of their albums to check IDs, as if to say, “If you can’t get past the first track, we don’t want your business anyway.
The record gets down to it from there, burying unlikely instrumentation under mounds of slippery, sloppy fuzz-guitar joy and topping it off with vampy, sweet vocal harmonies and power-pop charm, culminating early in the unlikely and wonderfully dark “Savage Victory,” a track that pulls off the rarely attempted, eerie mystique of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Arabian Dance’ in a feminine, Doors-based meditation. Hey: bravo! The next track, “Put Some Reverb On My Brother” does quite a shuffling, witchy Jane’s Addiction impression amidst (admittedly arbitrary) bari sax groans. “Camera (Queer Sound)” is probably the most-straightforward effort on the album, and the title track is indeed strong enough to mantle the album, but the sexxed-up bass-jam “Transparent World” will turn the most heads for its stubborn, oscillating noisiness and creepy robot vocal harmonies.
At nine tracks, the record is a tad short, but that means you can get by playing it twice in one sitting.
I liked it in headphones, but it can be nice to walk away from - and around - the fuzzy intensity of the jams at times, so it’d likely make a good hangout album. The last track is a bit of a harmless dud, its last-second addition of a muted trumpet an effective palette cleanser, nonetheless.
In addition to Record Store Day’s not-bad “The Space Project,” this is the album that got me excited about new music this month, and though the throngs of everymen that walk among us may not really compute a release so anachronistic and selfless, “Drop” provides great comfort to those who look at rock music as the domain of the genuine and hard-working, rather than the merely well-marketed. There’s a lot going on here, and it’s worth noting, tastefully so. It holds up after significant repeat listens, and its easy to pick out one’s favorite tracks. Underdogs Thee Oh Sees should be celebrated for balancing the emotions and ideas on display here and, well, “going for it.” One for aficionados, to hear it more than once is worth the price of admission.
For more, visit www.theeohsees.com.