While John Dwyer is readying his solo LP under the name Damaged Bug, his band Thee Oh Sees have announced their follow‐up to 2013's great album Floating Coffin.
According to a press release, the album was recorded in a banana ripening warehouse.
It features Chris Woodhouse on drums and contributions from Mikal Cronin, Greer McGettrick, and Casafis. The artwork (above) is by Jonny Negron.
Late last year, it was reported that the band would go on an “indefinite hiatus”, which Dwyer called “a well deserved break and a transitional period”. He wrote “we will see where the live show goes from there…”.
Review:
For a band who've built a career out of letting their collective freak
flag fly, Thee Oh Sees seem to be purposefully inching toward something
resembling normality. 2013's Floating Coffin found them inquisitively poking at
the frameworks of straight-up hard rock, and with 2014's Drop, Thee Oh Sees are
similarly playing with pop songs. There's definitely a side portion of
psychedelia folded into these tunes, as you might expect, but the oozing guitar
freakouts and epic-scale noise battles that used to be a traditional feature on
an Oh Sees album generally fail to materialize. Instead, Drop is a collection of
songs running between two and four minutes (the relative epic “Encrypted
Bounce” is the only number to break the five-minute barrier, though
it's still a modest work compared to the 13-plus minutes of Warm Slime's title
track), with many boasting cleaner arrangements than usual, along with actual
hooks. “Lens,” with its modest string charts, could pass for a bit of Left
Banke-style Baroque pop, and “The King's Noise” wears its fanciful
faux-British pretensions on its sleeve, while the layers of synthesizers on
“Transparent World” sound more like vintage prog rock than Thee Oh Sees'
usual low-budget hallucinatory ramblings. Sure, there are plenty of fuzz and
lysergic synth squeals to be found, but “Penetrating Eye” has an actual tune
and a singalong “la la la” chorus to go along with them, and the title cut
matches the savage fuzz of John Dwyer's guitar with a bouncy melody
that's suitable for dancing. And in grand pop tradition, Drop wastes little
time, spinning through its nine songs in 32 minutes, and leaving the listener
wanting more. There's enough of Thee Oh Sees' personality in Drop that fans
will readily recognize it, but if you've ever been turned off by their layers of
skronk, or the acid-damaged travels into the sonic wilderness, Drop could well
be the album where this band finally catches up with you.
All Music Guide – Mark Deming