Oh Sees Retrospective #5: The Cool Death Of Island Raiders

For the first few years of his career, alt-country/indie folk artist Bonnie “Prince” Billy changed the name of his group with every release. In an interview with The Boston Phoenix in 2003, he explained his motivation: “Well, I guess the idea is that when you have a name of a group or an artist, then you expect that the next record, if it has the same name, should be the same group of people playing on it. And I just thought we were making a different kind of record each time, with different people, and different themes, and different sounds. So I thought it was important to call it something different so that people would be aware of the differences.” Dwyer seems to have similar motivations with changing the name of his Oh Sees project over the years. He even explained that he revived the OCS name for the Memory Of A Cut Off Head album because he now sees OCS and Oh Sees as two different bands.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Despite the 5 on its album cover, The Cool Death Of Island Raiders is not the fifth OCS album. Rather, it sported the name The Ohsees upon its release on June 13th, 2006 (or March 7^th, according to Wikipedia). Adding Brigid Dawson as a third member to the evolving Oh Sees group, Cool Death may on the surface sound like a logical progression of the preceding OCS albums. After all, it’s also a freak folk album with some experimental elements mixed in.

However, it’s the things that do set Cool Death apart from the past that make it one of the most unique and frustrating albums in John Dwyer’s discography. The two drone compositions work very well with the flow of the songs and feel more naturally implemented and interesting than past excursions into noise. I especially love the way the second drone emerges from the clamor at the end of ‘We Are Free.’ The biggest negative for me is the overall sound and feel of these tracks. Bizarrely recruiting David Sitek of TV On The Radio as producer, this record has none of the crisp yet not overly polished style I associate him with. Rather it’s a cluttered, chaotic mess, with songs like ‘Broken Stems’ and ‘You Oughta Go Home’ in particular having too many unnecessary layers of sound. Why they used the distracting singing saw so often I’ll never know. Listening to the versions of songs from Cool Death on the stripped down Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion reveals the buried gems that were there all along.

Positive additions come in the backing vocals of Dawson and the change from acoustic to electric guitar. I’ve never really found Dawson all that essential to sound of this band, since her vocals often blend too much with Dwyer or get lost in the high throttle sound of Oh Sees in full flight. Heresy, I know—but even I can’t deny how much she brings to Cool Death, and maybe as I move forward from here I’ll appreciate her more. With the guitar change, we have the most seemingly inconsequential and historically significant addition to the sound. ‘The Guilded Cunt’ is a strong opening track for a band with no shortage of these, the delay effect on Dwyer’s guitar soon to become a signature staple. When they return to acoustics on ‘Losers In The Sun’, it can’t help but seem like a backstep. It doesn’t help that this track is also one of the worst in Oh Sees history, with its apathetic mess of overly repetitive strums, bumbling drums, and pointless bird sounds.

Two steps forward, one step back: Cool Death is one of those transitional albums in a band’s career that certain fans may love but everyone else will find unsatisfyingly interesting. Animal Collective’s Here Comes The Indian and Miles Davis’s Miles In The Sky-era records are good analogues. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t stand this record when I gave it one and only one listen a few years ago. I was expecting something much closer to the modern Oh Sees sound and I recall thinking, “what a pointless mess.” Revisiting it has improved my opinion, although only to the level of “a mess, but not a pointless one.”

Oh Sees Retrospective #4: OCS 4: Get Stoved

As the music industry transitioned from vinyl records and cassette tapes to CDs as the dominant format, a curious phenomenon began to happen. As CDs could hold around 80 minutes of music, record companies began to think that they needed to fill up all that space. Did they think consumers equated volume with value? Did they think people wanted 50ish minutes of music chosen by the artist followed by mostly superfluous, DVD bonus feature-esque remixes/outtakes/demos/live versions? I’m speculating as to their motives but it’s hard to look back and miss that average album lengths began to spike in the 90s. After all, some “double albums” from the 60s fit onto one CD, while “double albums” from this era absolutely had to fit on two CDs. Luckily we’ve seen the reversal of this trend, with more modern albums like The Flaming Lips’ Embryonic released as a double album for pacing and artistic reasons instead of because they’re too long to fit onto one CD.

This brings me to OCS 4: Get Stoved. Recorded at the same time as Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 and initially released with it as a two CD set, both albums are hardly above a half hour in length. They could easily fit onto one CD, so one must assume they were separated for good reason. If you listen to both of them back-to-back, though, you’d be forgiven for not knowing where one ends and the other begins. Is John Dwyer just being arbitrary and trying to make you think you’re getting a great deal?

Listening to them in isolation makes a huge difference. True, the distinctions may not be as clear cut as they are between, say, Castlemania and Smote Reverser, but I do understand why they’re given their own space to exist. Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 is overall more somber in tone, with darker subject matter. There’s more rough edges to brush up against. Meanwhile, OCS4: Get Stoved feels more calm and reflective, lacking any bursts of noise or experimental elements that made earlier albums bittersweet. It’s also the most consistent album so far—yes, the third album has greater peaks but it’s not as enjoyable all the way through. Overall I’d characterize album four as shambolic and druggy, tracks like ‘Crime On My Mind’ and ‘Tower & The Wall’ stumbling down the sidewalk stoned on a sunny California day. On a side note, I tried figuring out what “stoved” means, and between normal dictionaries and Urban Dictionary it has some interesting usages. My personal favorite is “being so stoned you feel sober.”

Released in the Summer of 2005, OCS 4: Get Stoved represents the end of the OCS name (until it was revived in 2017, but that’s a tale for another time!). This same year, John Dwyer’s main musical project, The Coachwhips, also came to an end. Perhaps to signal his new full-time dedication, OCS transformed into a series of sound alike name variants. And while the next album, The Cool Death Of Island Raiders, wasn’t a huge departure from what had come before, it’s still worth noting that Get Stoved is the last recorded as a duo primarily featuring acoustic guitars. Island Raiders may have a 5 on its cover but it’s definitely not the logical fifth album progression that this suggests.

After four albums that fully explored and finessed the OCS sound, it was time to go somewhere new. It was time for Brigid Dawson to join. It was time to sound like a full band. It was time to use electric guitars and delay pedals. It was time for OCS to evolve into Thee Oh Sees.

Oh Sees Retrospective #3: Songs About Death And Dying Vol. 3

In 1996, Nick Cave released Murder Ballads, an album of, well, murder ballads. These traditional and original songs detail, often in first person narrative, crimes of passion or outright murder. Though misconstrued as glorifying such acts, their purpose is usually more to examine how such things happen, the consequences of them, and how to avoid them. Cave’s album culminates in its penultimate track, a 14 minute epic about an unnamed narrator committing a mass killing at a bar in a town he’s lived in all his life. Murder Ballads is a deranged masterpiece, as darkly seductive as a serial killer documentary. I can’t say whether John Dwyer has ever heard this album, but given the title and subject matter of the third OCS album, it’s a safe bet he’s at least familiar with the song form.

Before we get to the music, let’s do a little history and background. Though it’s unclear exactly when Patrick Mullins joined OCS, the group began to be billed as a duo—not just a solo project with collaborators—with the paired release of their third and fourth albums. As with previous OCS albums, the official titles and release dates are impossible to pin down. According to Narnack Records, it was April 5^th, 2005, while Discogs lists May 5^th…and Wikipedia says May 30^th. Upon its initial release as a two CD set, the title was simply 3 & 4, with the albums subtitled Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 and Get Stoved (or possibly Get, Stoved). Today, you’ll typically see them online as separate entities using only their subtitles, with the fourth album now pseudo-retitled to OCS 4: Get Stoved.

Whew! Got all that? Now then…

Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 is the earliest release in which you can hear the nascent OCS/Oh Sees sound begin to crystallize. While it would be some time before the garage rock, prog, and metal elements were mixed in, the third and fourth OCS albums feel like a refinement of the freak folk sound they had explored up to this point. New member Patrick Mullins may or may not deserve credit for helping Dwyer focus his approach more. I’ve often felt like the varying members that he works with help draw different things out of him, and Mullins brings a simultaneously solid but ramshackle style to the table. ‘Bicycle’ and ‘Greedy Happens’ are centered around his pounding, simplistic drumming, while his use of noisy electronic textures on ‘The Pool’ and ‘Split The Take’ come off like more reactive, less chaotic versions of earlier OCS noise tracks.

The other big change I notice is that John Dwyer is finally writing some genuinely memorable and affecting songs. ‘If I Had A Reason’ and ‘Second Date’ are early career highlights, and even show up on Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion in more finessed forms. ‘Here I Come’, ‘I’m Coming Home’, and ‘Oh No Bloody Nose’ feature some of Dwyer’s prettiest vocals ever put on tape, alongside accomplished acoustic guitar strumming and fingerpicking. On a side note, is it just me, or does ‘Here I Come’ sound a bit like ‘We’re Going To Be Friends’ by The White Stripes? Anyway…

Whereas the first two OCS albums often seemed slapdash and carelessly put together, Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 showcases a newfound maturity. For the first time I sense a commitment to making music intended to be listened to more than once or twice. Completionists will still want to hear it all from the beginning, sure, but everyone else is advised to start here.