Let's get this joke out of the way: two years is an eternity in Osees studio album land. Coming cold on the heels of Protean Threat, Osees took an uncharacteristically long amount of time to deliver A Foul Form. Instead, they focused on hunkering down to survive the pandemic and released a string of live albums as well as clearing the (recent) vaults with odds-n-sods collections and a surprise remix album. Oh yeah, and main Sees-r, John Dwyer, also unleashed a set of improv/jam records under various guises with various lineups just for good measure. So while the drought between new Osees studio material may have felt interminable to stalwarts, we were hardly short of other drinks and tinctures to slay our thirst. Still, speculation ran rampant, as speculation is wont to do, as to what direction the then-theoretical next album would take. Would the transitional-feeling Protean Threat be seized upon more fully, leading the band to complete said transition and return more or less to their roots, skinning it back to the garage abandon of the Help era? Would they, as some fans hoped, 'course-correct' by reloading their save so that the modern robust five-man lineup could continue harvesting the heady mines of prog/psych/jazz/metal from the preceding era? Or maybe they would truly curve our expectations with something new, like bossa nova drum n' bass?
As it turns out, A Foul Form is neither a course-correction nor a true return to their garage era. Instead, the svelte 21 minute album challenges the gifted musicians to concentrate their sprawl and power into short, sharp shocks that call to mind the Black Flag covers on Live At Big Sur as well as, to some extent, the murky, formless post-punk of the Chrome covers on Levitation Sessions II. All of that said, A Foul Form is no slavish tribute/sacrifice to the old “kill-your-idols” idols; instead, it's one of the most outright alive and heavy sounding dispatches from one of the best modern rock bands going. Which is a bit ironic, given that a sickly Dwyer was finishing the mixing and vocals while suffering from a second bout of covid in late 2021. (Eerily, as I'm writing/editing this I'm still fighting off a really nasty non-covid illness that has had me sleeping ten hours a night for more than a week. But I digress.) According to the same Aquarium Drunkard interview I got that info from, this short hardcore/punk album was something the band had wanted to do for awhile...So while at first glance it certainly is a huge change from the preceding era it's certainly not a reactionary record. It must've just seemed like it was finally time. After all, if you can barely breathe you may as well yell and bellow.
So, yeah, this is less a Let It Be stripping it back-to-basics than it is a Reign In Blood/Damaged all-killer, no-filler love letter to the music they grew up on. Or perhaps a better comparison in Dwyer's own sprawling discography is a less blown-out and lo-fi take on what he was up to with Coachwhips and Pink & Brown. Make no mistake, though, it's still an Osees record through and through. There's always going to be an element of psychedelic and druggy oddness peaking through like a rainbow sprung from the darkness. The brief song fragment 'A Burden Snared' is a dense, layered, and transitory piece that honestly makes me think of Panther Rotate or (as said earlier) the hazy, formless, shifting Chrome heard on Alien Soundtracks. Album highlight and longest song 'Perm Act' uncouples Osees from their usual krautrock prog-motorik train cars and reattaches them onto a semi-truck starting/stopping in traffic between smooth reggae/dub influenced rhythms and up-and-down proggy instrumental calisthenics. Overall there's a real sense of fun and irreverence that was sometimes missing from previous releases, and I don't just mean surface level things such as offbeat/edgy track titles 'Social Butt' and 'Fucking Kill Me.' The title track is right up there with the finest stock of Osees' patented “hardest rocking song on the album” classics, and the loopy guitars backing the shouted chorus are irresistible. I picture someone rolling their eyes all around their sockets and belting out “a foul form! A foul form!” Assuming I ever make a playlist to exercise to again, a lot of this record is going on there. Make calisthenics great again!
Though A Foul Form was telegraphed a bit by Protean Threat, I don't know that I could have predicted how vital and successful the dip into classic punk and hardcore would be for Osees. If I'm being honest, I'm a little sad they didn't give us at least one more in the same vein of the post-Drop albums, but I suppose I do feel this way about every incarnation of this band. I just really love more or less everything they do, with even personal-least-favorites like Dog Poison or Putrtifiers II giving up gems on further revisits. All of which is to say, if we get another string of forms most foul, I'll just have to spend the next few Halloweens digesting the next batch watching skate video compilations and pounding Bang energy drinks instead of hitting the bong and watching horror movies at half speed.
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