Compilations, whether they be greatest hits packages,
outtakes and rarities, or singles collections, are tricky things to approach
critically. After all, do you judge them as a whole? On a song-by-song basis? In
the case of greatest hits, it’s not necessarily something the band chose to do,
and even if they are involved, it’s
largely done for commercial rather than artistic reasons. As for outtakes,
rarities, and singles compilations, they’re rarely given the same care and
organized thought that goes into proper full-length releases. By their nature,
they come from a limited pool of material, often with jarring stylistic or
production differences, coming from different years in a band’s career. While
Oh Sees’ Singles Collection Vol. 1 &
2 does its best to be a coherent listen, its most fundamental issue is actually
none of the above. It purports to
contain all the singles and EPs the band had released up to 2011, and careless
reviews such as AllMusic’s accept this tale. In all fairness, it’s not so much
a lie as an omission of the whole truth.
2011 is up there with the most prolific years in Oh
Sees history: even setting aside this double album compilation, you’ve got two
other full length albums to tackle, chew on, and digest. Amongst fans, this middle
period of the band is overwhelmingly the favorite era, and the two albums
released in 2011—Castlemania and Carrion Crawler/The Dream—regularly show
up on lists and Internet posts of fan rankings. Obviously, I’ll get to those
eventually, but I couldn’t go any further with this retrospective without
noting what an embarrassment of riches this year was. Anyway!
Released on March 8, 2011, Singles Collection Vol. 1 & 2 (hereafter referred to as Singles for simplicity) does indeed
include a metric fuckton of hard to find Oh Sees material. Collectors and
completionists will still want to track down all the original releases, in
particular the recently reissued Grave
Blockers EP, because they are not
all contained in full on this compilation. For the rest of us, there’s still a
lot to take in even if it’s not the whole non-album Oh Sees story. Just trying
to research the releases that the tracks on Singles
came from, to say nothing of following the chronology of the tracks, made
my eyes cross. Sadly, my vinyl copy of this release is back in America, so I
don’t have the full info inside its glorious sleeves. I apologize for not
supplying my usual level of detail on this front, but happily I am moving back
to the States in a matter of weeks and I should have my records out of storage
soon after. I hope.
This being a release intended for hardcore fans and
not some kind of A Young Person’s Guide
To King Crimson-esque introductory release to let the curious get a taste,
I won’t bother telling you get your hands on this ASAP. You either have it already
or you are getting around to it soon. With that out of the way, let’s hold Singles up to a critical eye and see
what I can shake out.
Is every track on here a winner? No. I’ve never been a
huge fan of demos in general, so ‘Catiastic Tackle - Demo’ is wasted on me, and
‘Contraption - Demo’ provides no useful hints to where it starts and ends when
paired with its eventual ‘Soul Desert’ twin on Carrion Crawler/The Dream. ‘Kingsmeat’, meanwhile, feels like an overlong
and undercooked scrap on the cutting room floor of Help, containing a vocal so distorted and unintelligible it sounds
like it was recorded through a bullhorn from a quarter mile away.
Does Singles
suffer from pacing/tracklisting order issues which cause it not to flow very
well? Yes. The stretch from ‘Hey Buddy’ to ‘Grave Blockers’ has songs I do love,
such as the underrated folk chestnut ‘I Agree’, yet it’s still too many slow
and low energy songs in a row; more than once, I’ve fallen asleep to side B of
the record. No, I’m not exaggerating for comedic effect.
Most importantly, are there some kick ass Oh Sees tracks on here? Fuck yeah. They definitely
outweigh the bad ones. The cover of Ty Segall’s ‘The Drag’ is a reverent
tipping of the hat to a then-up-and-coming garage rocker. ‘Carol Anne’ opens
the compilation with a roar, followed by John Dwyer delighting us with a line
about falling off his skateboard and turning his nipples into a belt(?) at the
start of the next song. And then there’s ‘Bloody Water’, one of Oh Sees’ most
infectious songs, with especially excellent backup vocals from Brigid Dawson.
In the context of their discography, Singles serves as a clearing of the
plates, a chance for everyone to catch up before the next leg of the voyage of
the S.S. Oh Sees. Fans of the early to middle period of the band looking for
more will be well served by stopping in this port. Before he would sail with
his crew into the more krautrock influenced second half of their middle period,
John Dwyer would first strip the band down to himself and Brigid, producing the
wonderfully weird Castlemania, an
album even more varied and unfocused than Singles.
I mean that in a good way. What else can you say about an Oh Sees album that
has more in common with Olivia Tremor Control than it does Can and The
Necessary Evils? Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
