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.”