Oh Sees Retrospective #6: Sucks Blood

2007 was a watershed year for music and videogames. Go back and look at a list of releases in either medium and you’ll find some of the most beloved and influential titles of the modern era. 2007 felt so jam packed with excellent albums that it inspired me to start my music blog at the beginning of 2008. More than any other year I experienced during the time I was keeping up with new releases, 2007 felt like a tidal wave of variety and excellence. I’m still discovering albums from 2007 that I missed out on the first time around. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed Sucks Blood as much back then, but today it’s another addition to the list of great-to-exceptional albums from that year.

Somewhat lost in the shuffle of a stellar year for music, Oh Sees released Sucks Blood on March 20^th (or May 15^th, according to Wikipedia). Confusingly, the album cover continues using The Oh Sees as the group’s name, though the inside cover lists them as their soon-to-be-semi-permanent moniker, Thee Oh Sees. I guess we’re still going through a transition, something borne out by the music. In addition, Dwyer and the group were going through a couple other changes. 2007 was the year that Dwyer’s Castle Face Records was founded (indeed, it was started to release Sucks Blood). More importantly, the album features the debut of Petey Dammit as bassist and second guitarist. If I recall correctly, he often played the role of bassist by running a typical electric guitar through pedals and/or a bass amp to get a fatter, lower sound, possibly using a lower tuning as well. Sleater-Kinney’s two guitarists use similar techniques, and as with Dammit’s work with Oh Sees, it’s an effect I really love as it gives a rock band a more unique sound.

Despite its fearsome title, Sucks Blood is actually a very mellow and sluggish record, and in some ways it serves as a more focused, better produced version of The Cool Death Of Island Raiders. Sucks Blood starts off with the red herring of ‘It Killed Mom’, a loud rocker that points to the future before the album immediately pulls back into the freak folk style that had defined the Oh Sees project. At least this time the production isn’t as overstuffed and distant/muffled sounding as Cool Death. Also crucial is that the songwriting is consistently excellent—‘Golden Phones’ and ‘Iceberg’ being some obvious career highlights, featuring Brigid Dawson’s lovely backup vocals. I’m not crazy about the odd choice of church bells used in the background of ‘Iceberg’ but I will give them credit for using the singing saw way less often. When it does make an appearance on the aforementioned ‘Golden Phones’, it actually blends in well and adds to the slow, dreamy feel of the track. Finally, as with the previous record, I dig the use of the two untitled drone tracks to lend some variety to the proceedings. Actually, the second drone track is worth noting because it’s the closest Oh Sees ever got to ambient music. It’s a field recording of outdoor wind and bird sounds, providing an appropriately languid and mellow end to the album.

Sucks Blood is a great record, a hidden gem in the band’s vast discography as well as the flood of other great 2007 releases. It serves as a satisfying capstone to the first phase of the band’s life, the last time they couldn’t be classified as a rock band. While I am very excited to get to the garage rock era of Oh Sees, I really want to take the time to say how much I’ve enjoyed exploring the freak folk era. It’s a different side of this band and Dwyer’s work in general, and it’s given me a different appreciation for them that I didn’t have before. Anyway, next time on the retrospective: get ready to crank the volume and enter the mosh pit.

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.

Pink Floyd To Release New Album! Or Not!

Pink Floyd to release new album!....no wait, it's actually Pink Floyd to release album of unreleased material!....no wait, it's actually Pink Floyd to release album of unreleased material from 1994 recording sessions that didn't include Roger Waters...hmmmm....

So, really, Pink Floyd isn't releasing a new album. What is actually happening here is that a collection of subpar leftovers from a band who can more accurately be called David Gilmour's Exploiting Band Names For Money is going to be released.