Oh Sees Retrospective #26: Live In San Francisco

The first music festival I ever went to was the 2007 Pitchfork festival in Chicago. Partly I was going since I had a good friend who lived there and we hadn't seen each other in awhile. Mostly I was going for the music, and specifically the first night which was presented by All Tomorrow's Parties and their 'Don't Look Back' concert series. Basically, ATP invited bands to play one of their 'classic' albums live in full. This edition had Slint performing Spiderland, GZA performing Liquid Swords (sadly wasted on me since I didn't like hip hop at the time), and Sonic Youth performing Daydream Nation. Ever since then, I've fantasized about seeing other bands performing their best records. When artists actually do a tour or a single performance of a 'classic' album, it's usually years after the initial release. Not so with Memory Of A Cut Off Head, which was performed in full during a short OCS tour in late 2017, including two San Francisco shows. While I would certainly give up my clear vinyl copy of Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion to see Oh Sees perform Help or Face Stabber, it is nice to have one live album that features a beloved record.


Culled from shows on December 17^th and 18^th of 2017, Live In San Francisco would be released on June 28^th, 2018. One thing I can tell you right off the bat is that it's one of the modern releases with the hardest to find information, in terms of websites not reviewing/covering it. I don't see it discussed much online, even on Reddit and other fan/music forums. I get the sense it snuck out there and only the truly hardcore/record collectors were able to get their hands on the various limited edition vinyl versions. The other big reason it's a hard release to research is that its title is exactly the same as the Oh Sees Live In San Francisco, so if you put “OCS Live In San Francisco” into Google most of the results end up being about the Oh Sees one. Anyhow, the OCS lineup for these shows bizarrely didn't feature Nick Murray or Patrick Mullins, who contributed to the studio album. Instead the cast includes John Dwyer, Brigid Dawson, Tim Hellman, Tomas Dolas, and Paul Quattrone, supplemented by a string section made up of Emily Elkin, Eric Clark, Heather Lockie, and Heidi Maureen Alexander. Elzo Durt, who provided the cover art, also did the awesome art for Carrion Crawler/The Dream. I recommend checking out his website, he's got a fantastic 60s concert poster throwback style. The last bit of business I need to address is that I purchased the digital version from Bandcamp since it's not on Spotify and some of the track names are fucked up or weirdly shortened. Another instance where I can't tell if somebody was lazy or didn't doublecheck their work. 'Neighbor Ton None'? 'On & On Cooridor'? Hey, you know what one of my favorite songs off Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion is? 'Dreadful Day.' You can't see it but I'm shaking my head right now.


Live In San Francisco is mostly a faithful performance of the studio versions of the Memory Of A Cut Off Head songs. As I said earlier, it's literally the album in full, in exact order, with some 'bonus' old favorites at the end. Like with the Pitchfork 2007 'Don't Look Back' performances I saw, there are a few little wrinkles here and there to make this live release a worthy companion to the studio versions. Dwyer uses a bit of echo/delay on his guitar, often between songs, and it's a cool effect. The noise/drone section at the end of 'The Baron Sleeps And Dreams' gets some big cheers from the audience, which always makes me smile. 'Time Tuner' gets a bit of David Bowie 'Heroes'-esque sustain guitar from Dwyer, giving it even more of a Nico vibe, and it's a bit slower and longer than the studio version. I enjoy the Dwyer banter sprinkled throughout, including him pronouncing the band's name at the start as “Oh See Ess”, so now we all know it's not “Oh Sees.” Oh, and there's a bit during 'The Chopping Block' where someone says something I can't quite make out but it makes Dwyer crack up and makes me realize how much this song sounds like David Bowie's 'Space Oddity.'


Otherwise, there isn't much to say about this release that I didn't already say about Memory Of A Cut Off Head, so I'll cover the final three throwback tracks for curious parties. Once the string players leave the stage, we get a nice Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion throwback with 'Dreadful Heart' and 'Iceberg.' The former is prefaced by a dedication to a friend of Dwyer, and is really close to the Hounds version. 'Iceberg' gets a weirdly self-deprecating “This is another old that we played for nobody a long time ago...” comment from him and a dedication to someone named Garth. There's a bit more to 'Iceberg' in this performance, including some gorgeous Rhodes organ, presumably from Tomas Dolas. And then there's 'Block Of Ice', and hoo boy!


To date, this is the longest track on any Oh Sees release. It starts out like the version on The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In, with a fatter bottom end thanks to organ/keyboards from Tomas Dolas. They extend the hell out of the song and Dwyer absolutely cuts loose on his electric guitar just like the epic, live album closing 'Contraption' on Oh Sees' Live In an Fransisco. Send 'em home with their minds blown! I can only imagine listening to this on acid. Around the eight minute mark you can really tell why Dwyer brought on Dolas full-time. He's a decent improviser in his own right and tries to keep up with the guitar madness going on. They return to the main riff and lyrics around 14 minutes in, and if you aren't paying attention to the runtime you might think they're about to wrap it up. Nope. You still have like ten minutes left, dig in! Around 15:35 it mutates into 'Ghost In The Trees'—why the tracklisting doesn't reflect this, I have no idea—before going off into more jamming and wrapping up with another runthrough of the 'Ghost In The Trees' riff/lyrics. Over the course of this performance, Dwyer does everything from silky delay trails/loops to grimy noise blurts and groans to bluesy riffs. It never quite flows logically but that doesn't really matter. It's all about the pure spectacle, like that live Frank Zappa album where they play 'Louie Louie' using the giant Victorian organ at the Royal Albert Hall. After the calmer/hushed tone of the rest of the Live In San Francisco album, it's a jarring change, though not strictly in a bad way.


In all honesty, if you own Live In San Francisco, you don't really need Memory Of A Cut Off Head. This may be a bit controversial, since some people always prefer to have studio versions of music. For me, though, Live is superior in every way. It's like having the original album plus three interesting, unique throwbacks as a meaty bonus, kinda like ordering a 12 oz. steak and getting three sliders as the side. Well, I guess one of the sliders should be a double bacon cheeseburger. Alright, let's stop torturing the metaphor. For fans of Memory, this is an excellent companion piece. For people who aren't especially big on the album, however, the three bonus songs are worth the price of admission alone. I've sure spent $7 on worse things.

Oh Sees Retrospective #25: Memory Of A Cut Off Head

As I near the end of this retrospective series, it seems fitting that I'd eventually get back around to talking about OCS. Now, you might argue that since I'm not covering Damaged Bug and other John Dwyer side projects, I shouldn't technically be writing about Memory Of A Cut Off Head. Yes, part of the reason he revived the OCS name is that he now considers Oh Sees and OCS to be distinct entities, though this is a bit of a sleight of hand. Early releases under the OCS name are certainly distinct in style and tone from, say, Help or Smote Reverser, but in the early-era of the band the subtle name changes slowly blurred OCS into The Ohsees and then into Thee Oh Sees and finally into Oh Sees. The lineup from the early OCS days also slowly morphed into the mid-era foursome, so even if I am cheating a bit on this one, I still think it's a relatively fair cheat. And anyway, Memory Of A Cut Off Head features contributions from Nick Murray and Tim Hellman, who were/are from the modern-era Oh Sees lineup, as well as future Oh Sees member Tomas Dolas, so there!


Like many surprise Oh Sees releases, the revival of the OCS name and announcement of an album seemed to come out of nowhere. Memory Of A Cut Off Head was released on November 17^th, 2017, mere months after Orc. Technically speaking, this record is billed as a collaboration between Dwyer and Brigid Dawson. This is interesting because she was never nearly as a big presence on old OCS records. They were dominated by Dwyer...which makes sense, since I think we all forget Dawson didn't join OCS until album five, The Cool Death Of Island Raiders, which was released as The Ohsees, not OCS. So I guess she was never really a member of OCS until 2017? Eh, maybe this is needlessly splitting hairs. Memory Of A Cut Off Head (hereafter referred to as simply Memory) is a fun throwback in terms of the OCS style. To have Patrick Mullins back is pretty huge, as is the reappearance of former Oh Sees drummer Nick Murray (who we last heard on Mutilator Defeated At Last, or the Fortress single if you want to be a stickler for details). Tim Hellman is an interesting addition to the OCS sound, since if I remember right they never really had a bassist before. John Dwyer must love him as much as I do! Tomas Dolas contributes unspecified keyboards to the album, marking this his first appearance on an Oh Sees/OCS album, though he's billed as Thomas Dolas because...I don't know. It's either laziness or whitewashing, and I'm much inclined to believe the former. Luckily this would be rectified on Smote Reverser.


Going into this retrospective series, I was most curious to tackle the early OCS output and in particular to revisit this one. I had only given a couple cursory listens to Memory before coming back to it for this series, and it's been an eye opening experience. I had almost forgotten how nice Dwyer and Dawson's vocals sound together in a more psych folk/orchestral folk setting, especially when he's singing more hushed and melodically. It's also much easier to pick out the lyrics, which are quite dark and suffused with death and sadness. For example, 'The Remote Viewer' offers the chucklefest of a chestnut: “we are junkies of despair.” Anyway, if Memory is a return to any era of the band, it's a return to the old OCS sound circa 2. However this time it's much more “professional” and full sounding, with the welcome addition of string arrangements. In fact they're essential to this record and its style. There's a very good reason the OCS Live In San Francisco has string players on it. Some of the Beatles-esque/early Pink Floyd whimsical psychedelia and orchestral folk elements I've detected on the 'solo' Oh Sees records like Castlemania and Drop are in full bloom here. There's other intriguing instrumental flourishes, such as the harpsichord on 'The Remote View' and another welcome trotting out of Dwyer's flute skills for 'On And On Corridor.'


On a side note, the overall buoyant feel and especially the Rhodes-style organ in the beginning of album closer 'Lift A Finger By The Garden Path' always makes me imagine a slower, more folky 'You're My Best Friend' by Queen. Am I the only one who hears it? Probably.


Perhaps the greatest change to the OCS sound comes in letting Brigid Dawson step forward as a true collaborator. As far as I remember, Memory is the first time she sang on an OCS/Oh Sees songs alone, and presumably she helped write at least some of the lyrics. Overall, hearing her voice alone reminds me a lot of another female singer but I can't put my finger on who for the life of me. 'Time Tuner' definitely starts off sounding like Nico. I know I also made this comparison for one of the last songs on Castlemania but 'Time Tuner' could have gone on The Marble Index and nobody would have done a double take. Anyway, this record makes me curious to hear more full-blown collaborations between Dwyer and other people. I know at some point he was rumored to be working with Ty Segall but that either didn't happen or it ended up just being Segall co-producing Orc. I'm a big fan of Segall's two collaborations with White Fence, in particular Hair, so I'm still holding out hope. But I digress. With all the changes and updates to the sound, and the addition of Oh Sees members, it's easy for me to forget the way Memory actually is a throwback in a few crucial ways. Obviously there's the mellow/downer atmosphere, as well as the prominent use of acoustic guitars and occasional singing saw contributions from Patrick Mullins. In addition, I love that the ending of 'The Baron Sleeps And Dreams' is a drone throwback to similar moments/tracks on OCS releases. One last throwback that isn't really an OCS throwback: the album cover was done by Jonny Negron, the same artist as Drop, which makes total sense because the color palette is almost exactly the same. I find his style more limited and less appealing than Ryan Beatty; as ever, your mileage will vary.

I've struggled with a way to conclude this retrospective because I have very complicated feelings about Memory. Let me start by saying it's absolutely tops as far as OCS-billed releases. It's as if it presents an alternate history wherein John Dwyer kept The Coachwhips going and so didn't steer his OCS project into going in more of a rock rather than a folk direction, becoming the Oh Sees we know in our timeline. Memory, therefore, is like if he kept putting out OCS records between Coachwhips projects, so that in this alternate timeline OCS developed/matured into this particular nuanced, orchestrated sound, while also allowing Dawson to step forward more often. Now, all of this said, though I may not have any issues and problems with Memory, I don't adore it. It works for me but it isn't something I foresee wanting to listen to consistently over the coming years. It's quite similar to how I feel about the Damaged Bug records. They get released, I listen to them and admire them and appreciate them for what they are, and I don't have many, if any, relevant complaints...yet they don't fully bewitch me. Well, that's subjective taste for ya. Next time we'll find out if OCS in a live setting makes any difference.

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 #5: The Cool Death Of Island Raiders

For the first few years of his career, alt-country/indie folk artist Bonnie “Prince” Billy changed the name of his group with every release. In an interview with The Boston Phoenix in 2003, he explained his motivation: “Well, I guess the idea is that when you have a name of a group or an artist, then you expect that the next record, if it has the same name, should be the same group of people playing on it. And I just thought we were making a different kind of record each time, with different people, and different themes, and different sounds. So I thought it was important to call it something different so that people would be aware of the differences.” Dwyer seems to have similar motivations with changing the name of his Oh Sees project over the years. He even explained that he revived the OCS name for the Memory Of A Cut Off Head album because he now sees OCS and Oh Sees as two different bands.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Despite the 5 on its album cover, The Cool Death Of Island Raiders is not the fifth OCS album. Rather, it sported the name The Ohsees upon its release on June 13th, 2006 (or March 7^th, according to Wikipedia). Adding Brigid Dawson as a third member to the evolving Oh Sees group, Cool Death may on the surface sound like a logical progression of the preceding OCS albums. After all, it’s also a freak folk album with some experimental elements mixed in.

However, it’s the things that do set Cool Death apart from the past that make it one of the most unique and frustrating albums in John Dwyer’s discography. The two drone compositions work very well with the flow of the songs and feel more naturally implemented and interesting than past excursions into noise. I especially love the way the second drone emerges from the clamor at the end of ‘We Are Free.’ The biggest negative for me is the overall sound and feel of these tracks. Bizarrely recruiting David Sitek of TV On The Radio as producer, this record has none of the crisp yet not overly polished style I associate him with. Rather it’s a cluttered, chaotic mess, with songs like ‘Broken Stems’ and ‘You Oughta Go Home’ in particular having too many unnecessary layers of sound. Why they used the distracting singing saw so often I’ll never know. Listening to the versions of songs from Cool Death on the stripped down Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion reveals the buried gems that were there all along.

Positive additions come in the backing vocals of Dawson and the change from acoustic to electric guitar. I’ve never really found Dawson all that essential to sound of this band, since her vocals often blend too much with Dwyer or get lost in the high throttle sound of Oh Sees in full flight. Heresy, I know—but even I can’t deny how much she brings to Cool Death, and maybe as I move forward from here I’ll appreciate her more. With the guitar change, we have the most seemingly inconsequential and historically significant addition to the sound. ‘The Guilded Cunt’ is a strong opening track for a band with no shortage of these, the delay effect on Dwyer’s guitar soon to become a signature staple. When they return to acoustics on ‘Losers In The Sun’, it can’t help but seem like a backstep. It doesn’t help that this track is also one of the worst in Oh Sees history, with its apathetic mess of overly repetitive strums, bumbling drums, and pointless bird sounds.

Two steps forward, one step back: Cool Death is one of those transitional albums in a band’s career that certain fans may love but everyone else will find unsatisfyingly interesting. Animal Collective’s Here Comes The Indian and Miles Davis’s Miles In The Sky-era records are good analogues. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t stand this record when I gave it one and only one listen a few years ago. I was expecting something much closer to the modern Oh Sees sound and I recall thinking, “what a pointless mess.” Revisiting it has improved my opinion, although only to the level of “a mess, but not a pointless one.”

Oh Sees Retrospective #4: OCS 4: Get Stoved

As the music industry transitioned from vinyl records and cassette tapes to CDs as the dominant format, a curious phenomenon began to happen. As CDs could hold around 80 minutes of music, record companies began to think that they needed to fill up all that space. Did they think consumers equated volume with value? Did they think people wanted 50ish minutes of music chosen by the artist followed by mostly superfluous, DVD bonus feature-esque remixes/outtakes/demos/live versions? I’m speculating as to their motives but it’s hard to look back and miss that average album lengths began to spike in the 90s. After all, some “double albums” from the 60s fit onto one CD, while “double albums” from this era absolutely had to fit on two CDs. Luckily we’ve seen the reversal of this trend, with more modern albums like The Flaming Lips’ Embryonic released as a double album for pacing and artistic reasons instead of because they’re too long to fit onto one CD.

This brings me to OCS 4: Get Stoved. Recorded at the same time as Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 and initially released with it as a two CD set, both albums are hardly above a half hour in length. They could easily fit onto one CD, so one must assume they were separated for good reason. If you listen to both of them back-to-back, though, you’d be forgiven for not knowing where one ends and the other begins. Is John Dwyer just being arbitrary and trying to make you think you’re getting a great deal?

Listening to them in isolation makes a huge difference. True, the distinctions may not be as clear cut as they are between, say, Castlemania and Smote Reverser, but I do understand why they’re given their own space to exist. Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 is overall more somber in tone, with darker subject matter. There’s more rough edges to brush up against. Meanwhile, OCS4: Get Stoved feels more calm and reflective, lacking any bursts of noise or experimental elements that made earlier albums bittersweet. It’s also the most consistent album so far—yes, the third album has greater peaks but it’s not as enjoyable all the way through. Overall I’d characterize album four as shambolic and druggy, tracks like ‘Crime On My Mind’ and ‘Tower & The Wall’ stumbling down the sidewalk stoned on a sunny California day. On a side note, I tried figuring out what “stoved” means, and between normal dictionaries and Urban Dictionary it has some interesting usages. My personal favorite is “being so stoned you feel sober.”

Released in the Summer of 2005, OCS 4: Get Stoved represents the end of the OCS name (until it was revived in 2017, but that’s a tale for another time!). This same year, John Dwyer’s main musical project, The Coachwhips, also came to an end. Perhaps to signal his new full-time dedication, OCS transformed into a series of sound alike name variants. And while the next album, The Cool Death Of Island Raiders, wasn’t a huge departure from what had come before, it’s still worth noting that Get Stoved is the last recorded as a duo primarily featuring acoustic guitars. Island Raiders may have a 5 on its cover but it’s definitely not the logical fifth album progression that this suggests.

After four albums that fully explored and finessed the OCS sound, it was time to go somewhere new. It was time for Brigid Dawson to join. It was time to sound like a full band. It was time to use electric guitars and delay pedals. It was time for OCS to evolve into Thee Oh Sees.

Oh Sees Retrospective #3: Songs About Death And Dying Vol. 3

In 1996, Nick Cave released Murder Ballads, an album of, well, murder ballads. These traditional and original songs detail, often in first person narrative, crimes of passion or outright murder. Though misconstrued as glorifying such acts, their purpose is usually more to examine how such things happen, the consequences of them, and how to avoid them. Cave’s album culminates in its penultimate track, a 14 minute epic about an unnamed narrator committing a mass killing at a bar in a town he’s lived in all his life. Murder Ballads is a deranged masterpiece, as darkly seductive as a serial killer documentary. I can’t say whether John Dwyer has ever heard this album, but given the title and subject matter of the third OCS album, it’s a safe bet he’s at least familiar with the song form.

Before we get to the music, let’s do a little history and background. Though it’s unclear exactly when Patrick Mullins joined OCS, the group began to be billed as a duo—not just a solo project with collaborators—with the paired release of their third and fourth albums. As with previous OCS albums, the official titles and release dates are impossible to pin down. According to Narnack Records, it was April 5^th, 2005, while Discogs lists May 5^th…and Wikipedia says May 30^th. Upon its initial release as a two CD set, the title was simply 3 & 4, with the albums subtitled Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 and Get Stoved (or possibly Get, Stoved). Today, you’ll typically see them online as separate entities using only their subtitles, with the fourth album now pseudo-retitled to OCS 4: Get Stoved.

Whew! Got all that? Now then…

Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 is the earliest release in which you can hear the nascent OCS/Oh Sees sound begin to crystallize. While it would be some time before the garage rock, prog, and metal elements were mixed in, the third and fourth OCS albums feel like a refinement of the freak folk sound they had explored up to this point. New member Patrick Mullins may or may not deserve credit for helping Dwyer focus his approach more. I’ve often felt like the varying members that he works with help draw different things out of him, and Mullins brings a simultaneously solid but ramshackle style to the table. ‘Bicycle’ and ‘Greedy Happens’ are centered around his pounding, simplistic drumming, while his use of noisy electronic textures on ‘The Pool’ and ‘Split The Take’ come off like more reactive, less chaotic versions of earlier OCS noise tracks.

The other big change I notice is that John Dwyer is finally writing some genuinely memorable and affecting songs. ‘If I Had A Reason’ and ‘Second Date’ are early career highlights, and even show up on Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion in more finessed forms. ‘Here I Come’, ‘I’m Coming Home’, and ‘Oh No Bloody Nose’ feature some of Dwyer’s prettiest vocals ever put on tape, alongside accomplished acoustic guitar strumming and fingerpicking. On a side note, is it just me, or does ‘Here I Come’ sound a bit like ‘We’re Going To Be Friends’ by The White Stripes? Anyway…

Whereas the first two OCS albums often seemed slapdash and carelessly put together, Songs About Death & Dying Vol. 3 showcases a newfound maturity. For the first time I sense a commitment to making music intended to be listened to more than once or twice. Completionists will still want to hear it all from the beginning, sure, but everyone else is advised to start here.

Oh Sees Retrospective #2: 2

Though mostly forgotten today, the short lived ‘freak folk’ resurgence in the early-to-mid 2000s was a kind of catch-all buzzword for groups like Animal Collective, Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, and Grizzly Bear. Knowing what we know now about John Dwyer’s musical journey, it’s odd to think he was ever associated with this subgenre. After all, isn’t he the garage rock/psychedelic guy? Not to mention, wasn’t his first OCS album riddled with noise and experimental techniques?

Time has a funny way of making predictions into false prophecies. The music writers during the height of the ‘freak folk’ era couldn’t have foreseen how far away from that style all of the aforementioned bands would venture. Animal Collective may get all the focus for how different they ended up, but John Dwyer’s OCS gave some of the earliest signs of breaking out. Though the second OCS album, helpfully and simply titled 2, may be a more traditional ‘freak folk’ album than their first, it still retains a daring, searching spirit. Whether this ‘more folk, less freak’ resulted in something to make it worth your time, well, we’ll get to that.

Released on either May 18 or June 14, 2004 (true date is unknown), 2 was part of a bumper crop of ‘freak folk’ albums released that year. Lost to time and popular memory, it doesn’t stand up to the rest of Dwyer’s work, and pales even further in comparison to its 2004 classmates: Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs, Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender, Grizzly Bear’s Horn Of Plenty, and Devendra Banhart’s Rejoicing In The Hands (and Niño Rojo). Coming from the background of an Oh Sees fan, 2 is by turns charming and quaint, with its hushed vocals, banjos and sloppy acoustic guitars. Coming from the background of a music fan, however, it often sounds like a less refined, more forgettable version of its contemporaries. ‘Killed Yourself’ reminds me way too much of Devendra Banhart’s pre-electric music, to the point I thought maybe Spotify had switched over to him. You can probably guess what ‘Banjo, Sold For Rent’ sounds like: as obvious and boring as a ‘freak folk’ track featuring banjo can get, like listening to someone try to showoff despite having little skill on the instrument.

If it seems like I’m being too hard on 2, I guess I’m as surprised as you are. On paper, I should remember more of it and want to recommend it. It’s a much more enjoyable and easy listen than the first OCS album. When it does dip into similar noise tracks (‘Intermission’, ‘Fretting and Fussing’) or experiments (‘Bisbee’/’Bisbee 2’, ‘Untitled Pt. 6’), they don’t last as long and aren’t as carelessly thrown together. Well, maybe Dwyer could’ve left off the last track, a pointless lofi recording of a boy trying to tell the Goldilocks fairytale, but I digress. Objectively speaking, I should have more positive things to say about 2. Some of the songs are OK and point to later, better music…the Pink Floyd cover is interesting for how faithful it wants to be…it’s nice to hear John and Brigid (I assume it’s her, I couldn’t find any personnel info online) singing together for the first time…yet…

Yet I still don’t have many positive memories of 2. It’s a below average ‘freak folk’ album that would otherwise be lost to time if not for the subsequent work of its creator. While it’s playing I enjoy it…and once it’s over I forget it. It’s a vapor cloud of an album, one that can’t hold its form and quickly dissipates. Competent and crafted enough to be listenable, it has nothing that hooks you or stays with you. 2 is that most disappointing of albums in that it doesn’t offer enough to either love or hate.

Oh Sees Retrospective #1: OCS

Going back to the very beginning of a band or artist with a long, varied career is one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes they hit the ground running and sometimes there’s an incubational period before their sound and abilities fully congeal. In the case of John Dwyer’s Oh Sees, however, they started life by going under a different name…and being a side project.  By the time the first Oh Sees album was released, he had spent years in the bands Coachwhips and Pink and Brown. I won’t speculate too much about his motivations for starting another band, though I will say it seems clear in retrospect that one reason might be that Oh Sees is fully controlled by Dwyer. He is the only constant element since its inception as well as being its mouthpiece and frontman.

Anyway, let’s talk about the album already!

Released on an unknown date in 2003, the first Oh Sees album (well, OCS album) isn’t the solo project I assumed it to be. According to Discogs.com, some of it is credited to Jeff Rosenberg, so it’s hard to say how much of this has Dwyer as driving force or not. But I digress. This debut goes under a series of different titles depending on where you look. Known variously as 1, OCS, and 34 Reasons Life Goes On Without You/18 Reasons To Love Your Hater To Death, it’s technically two different CDs released as one set. It’s unclear whether they’re supposed to be regarded as one album but for the sake of ease I’m going to talk about them as separate works.

Disc one, using the 34 Reasons title, kind of sounds like Dwyer was listening to a lot of John Fahey, Jandek, and Throbbing Gristle. Spastic fingerpicked guitars trade dance moves with harsh tape noise and on occasion, other somewhat competently played instruments such as keyboards, pianos, and drum machines. Here or there, you can hear Dwyer and/or other people say things or mutter. Little care or thought seems to be put into any of it, suggesting perhaps it was improvised or recorded with no second takes, or even recorded under a self-imposed time deadline. Perhaps it’s better to label it carefree than careless? I dunno. There is a certain eerie late night atmosphere to it all, and if you have any interest or patience for this kind of experimental music, you’ll find some of its untitled 34* songs, or moments of them, to be more enjoyable than you might expect. I don’t think I’ll ever want to return to it yet it did grow on me a bit during second and third spins.

As for disc two, 18 Reasons, well, if you wished that 34 Reasons had less structure and more patience-testing noise, tape hiss, and feedback, then have I got something right up your alley! Don’t misunderstand me, though. I’m not automatically opposed to experimental/noise music. After all, Throbbing Gristle’s ‘IBM’ is one of my favorite songs by them, and one of my friends used to do a collaborative music project called Gargoyle Monument that sounds quite a lot like 18 Reasons. The issue I have with noise music is that I think it’s more interesting in small doses and it’s more enjoyable when leavened with other musical elements. To be fair, these 18 untitled songs aren’t just straight up ear shredding noise. Some tracks, such as 4 and 9, are downright Lynchian—in other words, imagine mysterious rustling/rumbling sounds and dark foreboding textures. Still, CD two of the debut is mostly ear shredding noise. Mostly. I have a higher tolerance and patience for this sort of material than most people but even I was only able to sit through its entirety once. If you don’t care for noise music but still want to know what the first album is all about, stick to 34 Reasons and you won’t miss anything. Ancestor of Carrion Crawler/The Dream, this ain’t.

Much like fans of Oh Sees will tell you not to bother with their first few releases, fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 will warn you against watching the first two seasons, especially the true “first” season of the show, done on local access station KTMA in Minnesota. If you’re willing to slog through all the growing pains, poor quality VHS recordings, and awkward production quality and performances, there’s moments that at least gesture in the direction of greatness. So it is with 34 Reasons and less so 18 Reasons. They have moments here or there that diehard fans of the band and/or adventurous music listeners might enjoy, yet there’s no getting around the fact that the two-CD debut is an inessential release and should only be attempted when you’ve worn out all the good stuff.

*Since this album is long out of print and I couldn’t find it on any digital music services for purchase, I had to track down a shady website download for this review. CD one technically has 35 songs, despite its title, but the final track won’t play for some reason. I’ve seen people refer to the full album being on YouTube but all I could find was an upload of the first song.