“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 28th, 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.
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