I know a lot of people who maintain the same look for most of their lives. It's as though they reach a point and they say, y'know what, this is going to be what I look like for the next 30 years. Same general style, same haircut, same overall health, etc. Not me, though. Over the course of my life I've been very restless, sometimes exercising regularly, sometimes living like a sloth...sometimes shaving my hair and facial hair off entirely, other times letting my hair go for more than a year. I seem to just...get bored of being the same way all the time. It's interesting to see a new face in the mirror every once in awhile. I feel like John Dwyer understands this fundamental truth, and this is why he changes Thee Oh Sees to Oh Sees to O Sees to...wait, wait, don't tell me...
Oh wait, after Face Stabber they became Osees. Right? Right. Well, then.
Welcome back to the Retrospective series! And so we enter the new era, the Osees era. Another name change, another change in direction? Let's find out.
The elephant in the room before we get to the actual Protean Threat album is the preceding rehearsal webcast/performance, on March 21, 2020. I have to admit to only watching/listening to this a couple times since it happened, and I don't know that I want to do a full-on side-by-side comparison. In fact, I know I don't want to do one. I will say that for fans of this record, it's a unique look into songs before they were quite 'finished.' To these ears the performances sound pretty darn close to the album versions (with one exception), albeit this rehearsal performance has a shuffled order. Here's the rehearsal tracklist, for those curious, with their position on the eventual album in parentheses:
Terminal Jape (5)
If I Had My Way (9)
Mizmuth (8)
Red Study (4)
Scramble Suit II (1)
Gong Of Catastrophe (11)
Canopnr '74 (12)
(I think this might have been changed a lot since the rehearsal, or I'm totally wrong and this is some unreleased song, but I think this is Wing Ruin. Nothing else on the album matches closer to it...) (6)
Dreary Nonsense (2)
Said The Shovel (7)
Toadstool (10)
Upbeat Ritual (3)
Persuaders Up! (13)
At first I thought it was a cover of 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go' by The Clash but, nope. It's their cover of 'Don't Blow Your Mind' by Alice Cooper & The Spiders. Not sure if it should be counted as a separate track but at some point I think they're just jamming.
Finally, to Protean Threat proper. Released on September 18, 2020, it followed Face Stabber by just over a year. It featured the same core group from those sessions, with no additional/guest musicians this time out. Dylan McConnell, who has done several covers for Osees over the past few years, in addition to side projects like Moon-Drenched, gives us a typically abstract dose of jagged, vaguely digital looking reflective shards, like an early 80s post-punk album cover designed on a Windows 3.1 Printshop program. In keeping with trying to gather all the info about various pressings, my research on Discogs.com turns up pressings in 'Half Glass Of Kool-Aid', Neon Orange, Neon Pink (a Rough Trade exclusive that came with a sampler CD of earlier Osees songs), and black.
Just as Face Stabber answered the question, “what would it have been like if a punk band eventually made a prog rock record?”, Protean Threat answers the question, “what if that band then immediately went back to making punk rock, but forgot to turn off their effects pedals and keyboards?” In other words, it's a glorious bit of whiplash for a band who seemed destined to make either the next Tales From Topographic Oceans or, shudder, the next Be Here Now. Instead, we got a transformation that is more akin to what it would have been like if after Kid A Radiohead had said, “dy'know what, let's have a bit of that grunge/Pixies stuff again lads”, and it was actually really good.
If I'm being honest, however, I have to say on first listen I was underwhelmed by Protean Threat. It wasn't that I disliked it, since the rehearsal had prepared me for the change in material and song lengths. Moreso my initial impression was of a band who were simultaneously trimming the fat and just kind of sounding like themselves. In my younger years this lack of constant innovation and/or pushing to extremes would have derailed my enjoyment of this record. But nowadays I can look past my own taste preferences and enjoy this album for what it's trying to be, and what it succeeds at.
Further listens have revealed a wealth of great songs and moments.' Said The Shovel' and 'Terminal Jape' prove for the umpteenth time that this band has a hell of a lot of range and the ability to shift between styles. The former is a ghostly slow rhythmic groove that gives way to 60s keyboard stabs and an off-kilter bassline, and the latter, a new contender for “heaviest fucking song since the last album's heaviest fucking song.” 'Toadstool' kind of sounds like Primus or a jammier Residents. Am I crazy? Anyway, it's the longest track and shows how this new, svelte style of song lengths doesn't mean a dearth of undeveloped ideas or multiple filler tracks of half-baked sub-three-minute clangor. 'Toadstool' almost repeats in a circular song structure, like riding on a carousel while the band is all around you.
Now, can we just take a minute and talk about how incredible the Osees rhythm section is? Tim Hellman, Dan Rincon, and Paul Quattrone own tracks like 'Gong Of Catastrophe', a fitfully sleepy Can-esque jam that puts on autopilot as it cruises into the desert sky hitting its afterburners here or there before coming in for a controlled landing. The trio gallop all over instant classic 'Dreary Nonsense', sure to be a banger in setlists for years to come. Lastly I have to gush over the Stereolab-like pop-kraut groove on 'Canopnr '74', propelled by Hellman's throbbing bass.
Now, all of that said, my current tastes tend toward the psychedelic, the jammy, the elongated, the languid, so I find I can't quite reach the level of adoration for Protean Threat as I have with the last limb they were going out on. I was happy to continue cruising along the Mutilator-to-Stabber ley lines to further revelation, terror, and terrible revelations. True, we don't exactly know if Protean Threat is the start of a new branch on the Osees tree, with dense but brisk songs sounding mostly like their sound up until now, because they haven't had a true studio followup to it. Anyway, maybe a better way to put it is: Protean Threat is like microdosing, I enjoy it in theory but I honestly think I'd want it to be more intense and to last longer.
While we eagerly await the next studio album, we'll continue the Retrospective by taking a heavy swing onto the tree next door, harvesting studio outtakes/jams, a remix(!) album, and live albums. Oh boy do we have us some live albums to get to!
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