Led by the hyperactive John Dwyer, Thee Oh Sees is probably one of the most prolific rock band of its generation. More than 20 studio albums, a solid reputation on stage, THE reference in terms of garage rock music.
Dwyer is also one of the founder of the Californian record label : Castle Face Records. The story goes that the origin of the label name comes from a nickname of a friend of Dwyer, petrified by a joint too powerful and whose mouth was gaping, such as the door of a drawbridge.
John Dwyer settled down in San Francisco in his twenties. There, he created several bands as Pink & Brown, The Hospitals and after that, the famous Coachwhips : an aggressive and raw punk band.The band projects kept changing since its creation in 1997. First a freak folk solo project, it drifted gradually to a garage sound with the constitution of a proper rock band (Brigid Dawson, Petey Dammit and Mike Shoun) around 2007.
Acclaimed for their impressive punchy performances, Thee Oh Sees played and toured until 2013 before their first break. Around 2014, John Dwyer makes experimentations with his new project Damaged Bug : an interesting mixture of electronic and noise music.
Regarding Thee Oh Sees, the band reappears with new musicians on stage, including two drummers simultaneously. Since, Dan Rincon and Ryan Moutinho pound their instruments, play almost identical to the same shots, rolling close, which adds power.
What a surge of energy ! This new rhythmic settings became quickly their hallmark.
New formation includes Timothy Hellman on the bass, the two drummers and John Dwyer as a frontman.
After Mutilator Defeated At Last, the band took a new turn, more Krautrock. Nothing surprising when you know Dwyer is a huge fan of German Krautrock bands such as Can, Neu! or La Düsseldorf.
In 2016, two albums have been released : A Weird Exitsand An Odd Entrances. One year later, Ryan Moutinho leaves the band to be replaced by Paul Quattrone (!!!, Warm Drag).
Under the new name «Oh Sees», the Californian band launched Orc (2017) a powerful garage-rock release. Meanwhile, John Dwyer and Brigid Dawson worked again together as OCS for the album Memory of a Cut off Head. Prog- and metal-influenced Smote Reverseris out in August of 2018, an efficient record with a scary cover. Slight modification on stage with the addition of keyboardist Tomas Dolas from Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel.
The band kept up a steady rate of live shows throughout the next year, and Castle Face reissued two of the group's early lo-fi releases (The Cool Death of the Island RaidersandGraveblockers). They also found time to record Face Stabber, an expansively trippy album that added more electronic and free jazz elements to their already full sound that was issued in August 2019.
After releases by Dwyer's Damaged Bugproject and free jazz band Bent Arcana-- both of which featured appearances by Oh Sees bandmates --Osees (note the slight alteration of the name) returned in late 2020 with Protean Threat, a more aggressive, punk-influenced album that boiled their prog and jazz leanings into smaller portions.
Just in case anyone accused Dwyer of slacking, he rounded out the year by releasing Panther Rotate, an album made from drastic remixes of songs from Protean Threat, electronic excursions, field recordings, and a sideways cover of a song by Alice Cooper's early garage band the Spiders.
Dwyer spent much of 2021 releasing psychedelic avant-jazz records made with a rotating cast of fellow travelers, then the band embarked on a North American tour in the latter part of the year. When they returned to making records, it was with a set of songs that paid homage to the loud, fast, and uncompromising hardcore punk bands Dwyerwas a fan of as a youth and rediscovered during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Cheaply recorded with barely any reverb and half the length of their prior few albums, A Foul Form showed off the band at their most brutal and featured a cover of a song by one of the inspirations for the project, Rudimentary Peni.
Support:
Simply checking the pedigrees (ex-Arab On Radar, Chinese Stars, Some Girls, Doomsday Student, and Hot Nerdz) will only get you so far with Psychic Graveyard. With a manic output of four full-length albums—Loud As Laughter, A Bluebird Vacation, Veins Feel Strange, and now the brilliant Wilting–in nearly as many years, Psychic Graveyard makes consistently thrilling and unsettled sonic artifacts for a world emptied out and flattened by a joyless and sociopathic mediascape. But some things do stay consistent across their ruptured anti-aesthetic: Charles Ovett’s relentless workflow on the drums; the burbling sawtooth substructures, grimy lead synths, and deconstructed guitars supplied by Nathan Joyner and Paul Vieira; and, of course, vocalist Eric Paul’s many narrators and personas, who find form as ghosts howling from within the machine or as agitated surrealists living lives huddled in the grimmest of redoubts. On the new LP Wilting, once again a product of geographic dispersion (Providence and San Diego), the band invites the listener to peel back the pedigrees and fall headlong into their twitchy waking dream.
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
