Oh Sees- Face Stabber

Robert Pollard, legendarily prolific solo artist and leader of Guided By Voices, adheres to the idea that what his music is made up of is the four P’s: pop, prog, punk, and psychedelic. Though the new Oh Sees album, Face Stabber, isn’t made up of just these four constituent parts, it does bring to mind how perfectly they, too, have synthesized these seemingly contradictory styles. Sure, it made perfect sense when circa 2009 Oh Sees, known then as Thee Oh Sees, started to add krautrock to their witches brew of garage rock, psychedelia, psych-folk, and noise. But can punk and prog really coexist, even flourish? With Face Stabber, they’ve answered in the affirmative and simultaneously added ambient, jam, jazz, and even a bit of funk to their ingredients list. Somehow, it all holds together. Somehow, despite being a double album, it never overstays its welcome. Somehow, it works just as well listened to in one sitting on headphones as it does in the car, or my personal favorite, on the stereo at home, with breaks to get up and flip the record over, perhaps also giving you a chance to go crack open another beer or take a couple bong rips.

Yeah, it’s that kind of album. It’s a stoner nerd album made by and for stoner nerds. In fact, there’s a few other good ways to summarize Face Stabber:

1) It’s the best album of 1978 that was lost to time and finally released in 2019

2) Mathematically, it can be formulated as (Bitches Brew + Space Ritual + Soon Over Babaluma + Raw Power + Larks’ Tongues In Aspic + Hot Rats) / the best songs/moments on Smote Reverser

3) It retroactively makes Smote Reverser, while still a great record, feel like a trial run. I thought it was the start of the new era, but no, Face Stabber is the true new beginning. To use another band as example, I’m sure you’d say you like Sister by Sonic Youth, but do you listen to it or the follow-up Daydream Nation more often? Did Sister or Daydream signal a new direction for the band?

4) If it were a self-titled album, no one would bat an eye. There’s a certain implication to a band doing a self-titled album so many years into their career, and if you know what I’m talking about, you understand how it works in this case.

Anyway, you may have gotten the impression from other reviews, and from my formula above, that Face Stabber is a “whole is lesser than the sum of its influences” situation. I always come away from each new Parquet Courts album feeling this way; you can always play spot-the-influences with their songs, and everything about their sound and discography feels a little too self-aware and manufactured. So let me make it clear that Face Stabber is wholly an Oh Sees record and a “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” situation, instead. It has some of their heaviest songs ever and some of their jammiest/jazziest songs ever, too. Most of the songs have surprisingly catchy melodies and/or hooks in them for what feels like the first time ever. If you’ve always wondered why you don’t find yourself humming Oh Sees songs as often as other bands…this is exactly why. This is what the pop part of the 4 P’s brings to bands like Guided By Voices and Oh Sees. They’ll never write songs that are huge commercial hits, played in malls and sports arenas, but they do have some catchy, hooky songs, even at their weirdest.

And to be sure, Face Stabber gets weird. It makes me think of the episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, ‘The Gang Gives Frank An Intervention’, wherein Frank says something like “I don’t know how many years I got left, so I’m gonna get real weird with it.” I mean, you can totally picture John Dwyer drinking wine out of a can while saying the “where is that cup of tea?” bit on album closer ‘Henchlock.’ Other weirdness abounds, from the odd squeak toy opening of ‘The Daily Heavy’, to the perfect videogame title screen song that isn’t from a videogame (the proggy organ opening of ‘Scutum & Scorpius’), to the “I’m a nerd and I’m owning it” vibe Oh Sees have been showcasing for a few albums now, what with all the 70s prog rock, Dungeons & Dragons, and PC/console RPG aesthetics in their album covers, song/album titles, and music videos. I mean, come on: they hired a Magic: The Gathering card artist to do the Smote Reverser cover, and Face Stabber’s cover is an edit of a piece by legendary fantasy artist Frank Frazetta.

I suspect that, much like its predecessor, Face Stabber will be a love it or hate it release. I don’t understand why, because it’s flat-out better than Smote Reverser and has something for every kind of Oh Sees fan…well, except for the psych-folk holdouts. Anyway, it has it all: short/fast/loud songs (‘Heartworm’ could easily pass for a Coachwhips song), songs good for skating/surfing to (‘S.S. Luker’s Mom’), hypnotic, propulsive kraut-garage jams (‘The Daily Heavy’ is a modern version of ‘I Come From The Mountain’), cool ass guitar and keyboard noises/effects, Dwyer’s weird vocal tics and yelps, etc. To this we also add some new delights, like the ambient ‘Captain Loosely’, increasingly prevalent use of saxophones (Dwyer and guest Brad Caulkins both play saxophones on the album!), and Phish-esque organ/keyboard playing (seriously, the proggy organ intro to ‘Scutum & Scorpius’ is straight out of their playbook, like the intro to ‘You Enjoy Myself’).

That’s a lot to unpack and digest, because there is a lot to unpack and digest on Face Stabber. What holds it together and makes it work, justifying its double album runtime in the process, is the pacing and the wealth of ideas. Face Stabber has the best song order of any Oh Sees album in the modern era. It changes styles and gives you breathers at just the right times—the title track busts through two or three songs worth of riffs before it collapses into a field (recording), while ‘Captain Loosely’ functions as a rest stop after three songs in a row of high energy barnstormers, leting your heartrate come down just enough to match the pulse of the following epic jam ‘Henchlock.’

I’ve written before about how Oh Sees’ long songs don’t always have enough ideas or excellent solos/group improvisation to justify their lengths. ‘Anthemic Aggressor’ is the biggest culprit, too spastic and unfocused, and the soloing on it is unremarkable. John Dwyer’s guitar solos served their purpose on older albums but they don’t stand up to any comparisons of similar bands, past and present. It often feels like he’s doing a solo because it’s expected, not because he has anything interesting to play. It’s noodling, plain and simple. You see this pejorative term, “noodling”, used a lot in jazz and jam band reviews to refer to boring, lifeless solos or gratuitous improvisations. ‘Anthemic Aggressor’ sounds like noodling, ‘Henchlock’ and ‘Scutum & Scorpius’ do not. Dwyer has gotten much better as a soloist and band leader, otherwise we’d just have another Smote Reverser on our hands. I could see Phish covering ‘Scutum & Scorpius’, and when the percussion breakdowns on ‘The Experimenter’ happen, I can’t help but think of Fela Kuti or the better versions of the ‘Drums’ section of Grateful Dead shows. There’s far more development and dynamics to Oh Sees long jams now, and their live sets are continuing to showcase this side of the band.

I would encourage everyone to give this album a listen on headphones and focus on each instrument in separation. Much like how the dual drummer set-up and rhythm section on Bitches Brew serves as the solid earthy groove foundation for the soloists to fly off of into volcanos, oceanic depths, and even outer space, the two drummers and bassist of Oh Sees lay down a similar locked-in groove bedrock, by turns playing off the soloists and each other. On headphones you can really pick out the two drummers and see how often they’re in sync or doing slightly different fills and accents. Sure, previous Oh Sees lineups also featured talented musicians, but there’s no arguing that this current incarnation has the best in terms of technical skill and musical ideas. I loved Brigid Dawson on keyboards yet compared to how much Tomas Dolas has brought to Oh Sees in only two albums, it’s no contest. I mean, who is better in terms of pure musicianship: Ron “Pigpen” McKernan or Keith Godchaux? I rest my case.

So, is Face Stabber the band’s masterpiece, as some have suggested? Only time can truly give us the answer, although…well, hell, I’ll say this much: Face Stabber absolutely is the band’s most mature and focused record. This doesn’t mean it’s polished or boring or pop-orientated. Far from it. What it does mean is that you can listen to the album over and over, and it never gets dull or repetitive. I don’t skip any of the songs, even the long ones. It’s also the perfect album to listen to while watching a visualizer in iTunes or VLC or what have you. But I digress. Ultimately, it comes down to this: if you didn’t like Smote Reverser, you may like Face Stabber slightly more, but you still won’t like it. If you liked Smote Reverser, or even loved it, you’ll like/love Face Stabber even more. It may not end up being your favorite Oh Sees album, though it is their most consistent and consistently excellent album. While Face Stabber is also the culmination of several albums of progress and ideas, that doesn’t mean it replaces or nullifies the greatness of those previous albums. So, yes, you can view it as a culmination, but I prefer to view it as the true beginning of the new Oh Sees era. To use the band’s own words, Face Stabber is an odd entrancing, not a weird exiting.

Oh Sees Retrospective #11: Warm Slime

Is it possible to love something and to simultaneously see the flaws it possesses? I realize this seems like a pretty open and shut case. Plenty of people love so-bad-they’re-good movies or even talk about “hate watching” a TV show. But I think this idea becomes a little more interesting and open ended when you narrow it down a bit. To explain what I’m getting at: people love movies like The Room or Troll 2 not in spite of their incompetence, but because of it. You don’t see anyone talking about the Star Wars prequels as so-bad-they’re-good movies; rather, you see some people dissecting their flaws, even if they admit they get some enjoyment out of the movies. And I am one of those people. I see many problems with the prequels. They possess creative decisions and stories/characters that by turns infuriate me, baffle me, trouble me, and make me imagine how I would fix them. However, I don’t love the prequels and I also don’t hate them. What I do is to ignore the flaws so that I can enjoy them for what they are, for the things in them that are enjoyable.

I was talking to my wife recently about all these ideas and it made me realize, you also can love something while not even needing to ignore its flaws. I unironically love the old Godzilla movies, because I know what they are, and therefore to what standard I should hold them. Compared to other movies, they’re cheesy and have special effects that aged horribly and stupid plots and lame and/or irritating characters. But they’re awesome, in and of themselves. With all of this in mind, I have to come out and say it: I love ‘Warm Slime’ but it’s got problems. The album as a whole I love, sure—that title track though…well, we’ll get to that in a bit. Let’s set the stage, first. Could you help me carry these mic stands and cases of beer?

Warm Slime was released on May 11^th, 2010, coming more than a full year after its sonic predecessor, Help. Sure, they put out Dog Poison in the interim but that’s a different animal entirely (pun intended). On a side note, Warm Slime isn’t that much longer than Dog Poison yet it does feel like a completed, satisfying LP. Just wanted to be clear about that after my savaging of Dog Poison for its brevity (among other things). Anyway, I’d encourage everyone to go check out Warm Slime’s Wikipedia page, in particular the interviews/articles listed in the References section at the bottom. There’s a lot of fascinating background information about the recording of this album, from the nitty gritty of how they recorded it to the general vibe of the recording session. The TL, DR version is that the band consciously wanted to capture the energy and force of their live shows, so they rented out a club, day drank beer, and busted the whole thing out in one marathon 12 hour session. No overdubs. They recruited Mike Donovan of Sic Alps to play guitar, and recording engineer Chris Woodhouse banged a tambourine sometimes. They recorded the title track last so that they were drunk enough and warmed up enough to give it what it needed. Their intention with ‘Warm Slime’ was to do their own version of classic long songs they grew up hearing, such as ‘When The Music’s Over’ by the Doors, or more crucially, ‘Yoo Doo Right’ by Can.

Speaking of Can…

While for the most part Warm Slime continues their well-oiled garage rock/psychedelic concoction, it’s the turning point where their krautrock influence became much more overt. You wouldn’t have fan favorite tracks like ‘The Dream’ or ‘I Come From The Mountain’ without ‘Warm Slime.’ Just as I’m starting to feel like Smote Reverser was the dress rehearsal for Face Stabber, ‘Warm Slime’ is a first attempt at doing what we have come to expect from Oh Sees albums. Unfortunately, it also overshadows the rest of the songs on its album. Sure, we all know and love ‘I Was Denied’, but does anybody really remember ‘Everything Went Black’, or think it’s any kind of improvement or progression from Help? I’m not even implying that the second side of the album is bad or weak. They’re fine songs, great songs, even. The “I’m Dracula’s sister!” bit from the opening of ‘MT Work’ is one of my favorite moments on any Oh Sees record. It’s just that the shorter songs on side two pale in comparison to tracks on previous Oh Sees albums, and tracks that are yet to come. Most of all, though, they aren’t as interesting or memorable as the title track. And oh buddy, that title track!

OK. Listen. I said earlier that I love ‘Warm Slime’ but that it’s got problems. Let me begin by saying I love long songs as much as anyone. I’ll use less popular examples, because we all know and love the songs Dwyer referenced as inspirations for ‘Warm Slime.’ At least I hope so; if you have never gotten high and listened to ‘Yoo Doo Right’, you haven’t been living your best life. Anyway, my favorite Frog Eyes song is ‘Bushels’, which is nine minutes long; my favorite album by them is Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph, which has only one track less than three minutes long, and four that are longer than six minutes. I love the Grateful Dead and Phish, known for long jams that frequently go on for 10, 20, in one case 50+ minutes! So it’s not that ‘Warm Slime’ is long, that isn’t its flaw. I love the song yet I’ve come to finally understand why it is I think it’s got problems: it doesn’t have enough ideas or progression to justify its length. But surely, you may be saying, other long Oh Sees songs, are also static and do the same thing for minutes on end? To that I’d respond, do they really? Go back and pay attention, you’ll see that there’s more development, meaningful solos, and a sense of progression, even if it is just from point A to point B.

Often long Oh Sees songs are described as hypnotic, whereas I would describe ‘Warm Slime’ as repetitive and intend that as a pejorative. Sure, they start out in full flight and then around the two minute mark they shift gears from garage rock rancor into a krautrock trance. Sure, they get quiet halfway through the song and build it back up. But again, listen closely to the musical development that’s going on. Petey Dammit plays the same bass note, over and over, and it’s not hypnotic, it’s monotonous. Quite literally, it is a monotone. Doing this with a non-tuned instrument, like, say, a drum works fine. But when it’s a bass, or keyboard, or guitar, or I dunno, a harp, it eventually gets boring and tedious. If you’ve always wondered why ‘The Dream’ is such an amazing song, and why perhaps you, also, like it more than ‘Warm Slime’, this is why. Even setting aside that ‘The Dream’ is shorter, there’s more notes and ideas going on there. The bass line is the anchor of everything; the guitars dance in and out of phase with it, by turns supporting its propulsion with staccato chords and spraying rhythmically detached noise and solo lines over the top of it, like fireworks into the night sky. The bassline in ‘The Dream’ has more notes, has more variance in volume and how much it olds your attention over the course of the song. It’s a heartbeat, and you don’t always notice your own heartbeat, do you? But you know what you do notice, every time, and can’t ignore, and what the ‘Warm Slime’ bassline has begun to make me think of? Something that maybe at first you try to but eventually you can’t ignore, and it gets old fast? Pencils down, any guesses? It makes me think of someone running a vacuum cleaner.

Now, here’s what is so weird for me about writing all of this. I still love ‘Warm Slime.’ I still would consider it, if perhaps not one of the best Oh Sees songs, one of the most essential. How do I reconcile this? Well, it’s like I said at the beginning of this retrospective: you can love something while not needing to ignore its flaws. I fully acknowledge the flaws of ‘Warm Slime’, but when I listen to it, I don’t need to ignore the bassline, or its overall relative lack of development and ideas. To use a non-musical example, I know that MacGruber is a comedy with flaws. But I unashamedly love it, and in order to love it, I don’t need to ignore them. Whenever ‘Warm Slime’ begins, I get a rush of energy and excitement. Fuck yeah, I think to myself, let’s do this! There are precious few things in my life right now that give me this feeling. I don’t want to bring my personal life into this, I’m just trying to demonstrate, ‘Warm Slime’ is a kickass song. Like me, it’s got flaws. But I know that my wife loves me, not despite my flaws, not because of them, but because she loves me, full stop. She doesn’t need to ignore my flaws to think I’m a kickass person. If a song can make me feel like ‘Warm Slime’ does, and I can make my wife feel like how ‘Warm Slime’ makes me feel, who needs to dwell on flaws? We should talk about them, and hope they get better (spoiler alert: they do, Carrion Crawler/The Dream is amazing), but they don’t always, inherently, spoil things. That’s a good place to be in.

So, yeah. Warm Slime is great.

Oh Sees Retrospective #10: Dog Poison

What do you expect when you see something labelled as a full LP, and not an EP or single? Is it only about the length? Is it about how many songs there are? Is it about artistic intent? Let’s consider one of the most famous short albums in history, Slayer’s towering masterpiece, Reign In Blood. At a svelte 28 minutes, it’s significantly shorter than the average LP, which I usually think of as being around 45-60 minutes in length. To me, usually, I think of sub-half hour releases as being EPs. But that’s not really an accurate metric, the more I think about it. Reign In Blood is short, but it doesn’t feel short. It’s a wholly satisfying experience—adding more songs would dull its skull shattering power, and removing any songs to make it an EP would have similar detrimental effects. Why, then, is it that I feel like Dog Poison doesn’t qualify as a true LP? It can’t be because it’s short, because as we’ve established, that isn’t a fair criterion.

Let’s touch on a few other points and maybe we’ll figure it out along the way. Released mere months after Help, Dog Poison came out on September 28^th, 2009. I’ve long assumed it was an EP of rough demos based on its production style and length, but it’s very clearly described as a finished LP online. Similar to Help, it’s not on the Oh Sees Bandcamp page and I couldn’t find any information about who plays on it. Wikipedia seems to suggest it was recorded solely by John Dwyer, though given how much flute is on the album this clearly isn’t true. Strangely, the Castle Face website says that Dog Poison came out “after Warm Slime” which also, clearly, isn’t true. You’d think Dwyer’s personal record label would get that kind of easy detail right but then again, they have a lot of good drugs in California. If anybody can contact him and get me hired as his discography guardian, I’d appreciate it. I don’t mind working weekends and I bother to do even the smallest research!

Every Oh Sees album seems to have its defenders and fans, though with Dog Poison I’ve gotten the impression it has the least amount of them all, with the exception of the earliest OCS records. I also get the impression it’s a divisive release, though unlike the similarly divisive Smote Reverser, I haven’t seen anyone say they outright love it or it’s in their top five favorite Oh Sees records. I’ve never really liked Dog Poison; even when I was considering its quality based on my assumption that it was an EP of rough demos/unfinished songs, I still didn’t like it. In fact, it’s the only Oh Sees album I ever bought on vinyl and traded it back in to the local record store. Shocking, no? I simply don’t have a collector’s mentality in the same way some people do. If I don’t like an album, no matter how rare or expensive it is, I trade it in and let someone else enjoy it. Pay it forward, and all that.

OK, so where does that leave us regarding Dog Poison’s status as a non-LP, but-no-really-it-is-a-LP-you-guys? Time to break it down. It’s short and it feels short. Just as I think the two bonus tracks on most releases of Master’s Bedroom make it feel overlong and weaken the listening experience, there isn’t enough of Dog Poison for it to satisfy. What little music there is comes off as things Dwyer threw together in an afternoon when he was bored at home. The lo-fi production style does the songs no favors, muting and muddling the sound such that even when listened to on headphones I can’t tell if it’s Dwyer or Brigid Dawson doing the back-up vocals. It further reinforces the notion that the entire album is slapdash and rough around the edges, but not in the pleasing way that Castlemania is more lo-fi and rough than other Oh Sees releases. I’ve never been the biggest fan of Castlemania but it has something to it that I uncover and enjoy more each time I have revisit it. It’s the one I’m most looking forward to doing a retrospective post on, whereas Dog Poison is something I’m looking forward to being done with. It’s like a birthday party that is somehow boring and depressing when you were expecting fun and entertaining.

Anyway, with far fewer songs than Castlemania, Dog Poison’s weak tracks stand out more starkly, and the production does no favors. The songwriting quality is poorer than it has been since the days of OCS—speaking of, I find Dog Poison to be a regression to the infantile pseudo-folk of those early releases. Other than the use of flute, which is a fun novelty, the music and instrumental playing are frankly kind of boring. Just when he was doing new and interesting things with electric guitars, Dwyer goes back to the acoustic and has seemingly forgotten how to play anything compelling on it other than it being used for rhythmic chording and time keeping. I almost like ‘It’s Nearly Over’ and then that blown out acoustic guitar punches through with no riff or hook or melody to it. All the instruments seem to bleed into each other and get in each other’s way—‘The Fizz’ could be a fantastic garage rock track, if it didn’t sound like it was recorded by the Mr. Mike Voice Changer/Tape Recorder from Toy Story….that was a quarter mile way…that was also soggy from someone spilling their Guinness on it. I’m exaggerating to make a point, of course. I need to make clear, lo-fi production is fantastic when it’s used effectively and sympathetically—you can’t be a Guided By Voices or Daniel Johnston fan if you can’t embrace tape hiss, warping, and amateurish mixing/mastering. We know Dwyer has access to better equipment so Dog Poison’s production is a deliberate choice. A baffling choice that doesn’t work, but a deliberate choice nonetheless.

If it sounds like I hate Dog Poison, it’s only because I hold Oh Sees albums to such a high standard. Even the releases that I don’t like as much as others have something unique and/or endearing about them. So, no, I don’t hate Dog Poison. It’s just…inessential and kind of pointless to listen to it anymore. Oh Sees have 20+ albums to their name(s), to say nothing of all the EPs (which Dog Poison should have been!) and singles. Why waste your time with this dull, dreary, poorly recorded mess?

Alternate/Hot Take/Spinal-Tap-Reference-Review: Dog Poison? More like Dog Shit!

Oh Sees Retrospective #9: Help

“Always different, always the same.” These words from legendary British radio host/DJ John Peel perfectly encapsulate what the band The Fall is all about. You could always tell straight off the bat when listening to a new album that it was The Fall even if it sounded like other things, too. Their style changed over the years yet it was at its core still The Fall. Always different, always the same; this same dictum holds true about Oh Sees. As I write this retrospective, we’re about a week away from the release of Face Stabber, an album which continues to expand the sonic universe of Oh Sees while still sounding like Oh Sees. There’s something unmistakable about their music, despite the varying style, approach to music making, and ever shifting lineup (though The Fall certainly has Oh Sees beat for frequency of lineup changes!). Help is firmly placed in what I consider the garage rock era of Oh Sees, but there’s also sprinkles of psychedelia, noise, and krautrock on the sundae, so to speak.

This is all a long way of saying that while Help may not sound all that different from its predecessor, it does prove that there’s still a lot of juice left in the garage rock orange. Released on April 28^th, 2009, the follow-up to The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In seems to get lost in the shuffle of the increasingly prolific Oh Sees discography. Despite doing my usual research the only background information I can find on Help is its release date and where it was recorded (The Hangar in San Francisco). For starters, the album isn’t on the Oh Sees Bandcamp page which is odd. It must be an issue of licensing or digital download/streaming rights. Speaking of licensing, the listing on the In The Red Records website is bafflingly misleading. It has a quote from John Dwyer which, given the context of the rest of the blurb, is him talking about the difference between Castlemania and Help. In actuality the quote is from him comparing Carrion Crawler/The Dream to Castlemania! It’s worth noting the In The Red Records webpage about Carrion Crawler/The Dream gives its title as Carrion Crawler, no forward flash or “The Dream” in sight. Do they care, like, at all? Are they in some kind of legal dispute with John Dwyer and they’re having a laugh? Are they purposefully misleading people as some kind of petty revenge?

But I digress. There’s no information anywhere on Help’s personnel though I assume it’s the same lineup from Master’s Bedroom. I swear at least some of the tracks have two drummers—am I crazy? Anyway, while I do see some fans touting Help as their favorite, it doesn’t get as much adoration as other universally beloved Oh Sees classics like Carrion Crawler/The Dream, Mutilator Defeated At Last, and Floating Coffin. Sure, there’s a guy on the cover of Singles Collection Volume 1 & 2 with its art drawn on his chest but I’ve always assumed this was a reference to the cover of Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine with its similarly meta photo.

On a side note, you might assume from my Reddit profile pic that Help is my favorite. I do really love it—we’ll get to that—but it’s not my favorite. I use it because it’s my favorite Oh Sees album cover. Well, for the past year or so anyway. Favorite Oh Sees album cover or album title is just as hard to pick as my favorite Oh Sees album and seems to continually change.

Oh, you want to know what my current favorite Oh Sees album title is? Floating Coffin. It makes me think of the save rooms from Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night. OK, OK, let’s get back on track.

Help was the first Oh Sees music I ever heard and it will always hold a special place in my heart. I’ll never forget walking into a room at my then-current job back in 2011 and hearing ‘Destroyed Fortress Reappears’ blaring from a coworker’s computer. A few months before I had overheard a different coworker playing MM..Food by MF DOOM, which helped cultivate a love for hip hop, so it was a pretty awesome job from time to time. Anyway, I try to avoid profanity in writing unless it’s called for so understand that there’s only one way I can truly describe my reaction: it blew my fucking mind. It was one of coolest sounding things I’d ever heard, akin to the first time hearing Miles Davis’s space echo trumpet wails during the intro of Bitches Brew’s title track. The guitar and organ riff that powers ‘Destroyed Fortress Reappears’ feels like it belongs in a horror movie or a videogame. Or perhaps a horror videogame titled ‘Castlemania.’ But I digress.

What makes Help such a fantastic album, and a solid contender for “objective” best Oh Sees album, is that it takes what Master’s Bedroom established and simultaneously expands on it and finesses it. I never skip any tracks when listening to Help; it’s perfectly paced and every song, and the record as a whole, is just as long as it needs to be. Hypnotic jams like ‘Destroyed Fortress Reappears’ and ‘Go Meet The Seed’ zoom down the road alongside shorter, get-in-get-out tracks like the song fragment ‘The Turn Around’ and underrated rave-up ‘Rainbow.’ Help has a warm lo-to-mid-fi production style that allows you to hear the separation between the instruments and vocals without being too clean and digital sounding. And of course John Dwyer’s vocal tics and distorted reverb-and-echo drenched guitar is in full flight here. Help is such a solid, enjoyable listen than I often play it over and over in a loop, like I do with the first two Pixies records (and their flawless debut EP Come On Pilgrim. Seriously, go listen to it if you haven’t heard it before). It’s the sort of album in a band’s discography where I fully understand if it isn’t your personal favorite yet I can’t imagine any fan not loving it. Hyperbole or not, you cannot like Oh Sees and not like Help. Interesting, then, that mere months after its release they followed it up with Dog Poison, one of their most divisive and regressive releases. But we’ll get to that next time.

Oh Sees Retrospective #8: Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion

It’s a common experience in music to listen to something that you just don’t get. Maybe it’s an album you’ll eventually like, maybe it’s a style of music that isn’t your cup of tea, maybe you just weren’t in the right mood that day. Expectations, too, can play a part. In my early days of being an Oh Sees fan, I hadn’t memorized their discography yet, and would often stumble on their releases not knowing exactly what I was getting into. Spotting Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion in a record store in Ann Arbor in the Fall of 2013, I remember thinking, “weird, they have a live album that comes with a DVD, why didn’t anyone tell me?” Funnily enough, I was actually on a first date that day. It didn’t end up going anywhere but my love affair with this album had only just begun, in a quite literal sense. You see, at first, I didn’t really like it.

Take a deep breath, I’ll get there by the end of the story!

Let’s detour briefly and talk about the hard facts. Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion was released on August 22^nd, 2008 (or the 25^th, if you believe Wikipedia). Due to the vagaries of music release schedules and DVD production, it came out after The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In despite being recorded before it. With the classic freak-folk lineup including Patrick Mullins on drums, Thee Hounds features songs from the band’s releases up to this point, a few originals, as well as nascent versions of ‘Block Of Ice’ and ‘Ghost In The Trees’ that would be reworked for Master’s Bedroom. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the DVD included with this album. Not only does it feature the band performing the songs in various locations around San Francisco, but it has segments between songs of the band goofing off, telling stories, and doing party tricks. I believe the whole thing is on YouTube for those who haven’t seen it. It’s essential viewing, equally intimate and electrifying, and a glorious window into the otherworldly being that is John Dwyer.

I’ll dispense with any more formalities and come out and say it: Thee Hounds is one of my favorite albums, ever. I love everything about it, from the production style to the improved versions of past songs to the album cover to the look and feel of the DVD performances and between song segments. Sometimes when I do the dishes I put on this album and I get so caught up air guitaring along to ‘We Are Free’ and singing along to the songs that I forget I was even doing dishes. So, you’re probably still wondering: why didn’t I like it at first? Mostly it was down to expectations. I had no clue about the earlier era of this band, and the vast difference between something like ‘If I Had A Reason’ and latter day classics like ‘The Dream’ left me confused. Was this some kind of stripped down, MTV Unplugged style live album? Sure ‘Golden Phones’ is pretty as hell, and ‘Dreadful Heart’ is spellbinding. But…but I want to hear ten minute versions of ‘I Come From The Mountain’ and ‘Destroyed Fortress Reappears’! I want to mosh along to it alone in my apartment, spilling beer on the floor and falling over my couch! I suppose the other reason it didn’t click with me at first is that I was going through a serious “I want music to be as crazy as possible!” phase, mainlining Miles Davis live albums from the early to mid ‘70s, getting into No Wave and industrial music, obsessing over shoegazer and noise pop, and continuing to make my own crappy, amateurish experimental music with as many layers, samples, and effects as I could get my hands on. But I digress. I love this album now, all is right with the world.

I get the sense that Thee Hounds is a more or less universally beloved Oh Sees album. Maybe I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say it’s a perfect live artifact of this era of the band. The only complaint I have is that ‘Highland Wife’s Lament’ doesn’t quite belong. I think it’s an interesting experiment though I usually skip over it. I dunno, it seems more like something I’d expect on a Blackout Beach record. Anyway, as I said earlier, I love the reworkings of earlier songs, and comparing the slower versions of ‘Block Of Ice’ and ‘Ghost In The Trees’ to the Master’s Bedroom versions is interesting, particularly because they sound like a halfway point between the freak-folk and garage rock eras. Still, Thee Hounds is a very special album to me regardless of its rarity, style, and place in the band’s history. It’s the best starting point for getting into the earlier freak-folk era of Oh Sees and the DVD is an essential piece of understanding Oh Sees and the world of John Dwyer.