Almost two years ago, I visited San Francisco for the first time. With its ideal climate, friendly people, and easy access to hallucinogenic drugs (not to mention the two beautiful girls who admitted they were on acid while hitting on me outside of Rickshaw Stop), it quickly became one of my favorite cities in the world, and the one I would move to if I ever decided to leave the comfort and occasional weed of the Pacific-Northwest.
Judging from the Best Records of 2009 feature, you may have noticed that we’re all down with the psych-garage scene coming out of the city by the bay. Though psychedelic prom band Girls, San Francisco’s chief musical export of the moment, is easily the most divisive of the lot, there are a ton of bands agreed upon: Wooden Shjips. Ty Segall. Citay. Sic Alps. The Fresh and Onlys. The Mantles. Given the aforementioned access to controlled substances, it’s only appropriate that all of the acts mentioned, despite the approach being varied from band-to-band, employ a very “specific” sort of sound, the same specifics historically ascribed to Bay Area bands since the acid test days.
My favorite is the most garage of the bunch, Thee Oh Sees. Led by John Dwyer, who has fronted no fewer than 100,000 bands over the past decade (merely a low ballpark figure), Thee Oh Sees are a little more accessible than vintage Dwyer bands such as Coachwhips or The Hospitals, due to focused, vocal-driven song craft, the melodic vibe heightened greatly by the vocal interplay between Dwyer and honey-voiced soprano Brigid Dawson. But don’t think that the rhythm section is slacking on their game at all; bassist Petey Dammit and drummer Mike Shoun are locked-in at all times to give Dwyer stable ground to run amok all over. And if you’ve ever seen the band live, “running amok” is probably a very light description for what Dwyer is capable of. By swallowing mics, swilling beers, swinging around guitars, in addition to, you know, singing and playing and stuff, it seems as though not even Dwyer’s bandmates know what’s going to happen next, frequently looking in his general direction with nervous anticipation while hammering away their parts. The tight-rope-with-no-net unpredictability, coupled with the brevity and intensity of the songwriting, are the key components to Thee Oh Sees being unquestionably one of the most thrilling live groups in America right now.
In 2008, Thee Oh Sees released The Master’s Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In, which was released and DRAMATICALLY underpressed by Tomlab. Luckily for you, the record has been re-released by In the Red, current label home of Vivian Girls and former home of the recently-deceased Jay Reatard. Produced in part by TV on the Radio guitarist and knob-dude Dave Sitek, The Master’s Bedroom has the same live-off-the-floor energy of one of Sitek’s more well-known production coups, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, with thwacking drums caving your chest in and the distortion and reverb from the guitars making you check for early symptoms of tinnitus. The record begins with a huge, ringing, dissonant chord, and Dwyer yelling in the background in order to get shit started. What follows is a guitar riff that would be described as “chunky”– if I didn’t think that term was a little on the corny side– and Dwyer and Dawson wishing to be left on a block of ice, and doing a little addition reminiscent of 2Gether’s timeless classic, “U + Me = Us (Calculus)”.
Most of the tracks here are driving, pulsating numbers (the best of which being the aforementioned “Block of Ice,” “Visit Colonel”, and the somewhat-appropriately-named “Grease 2”), but around after the halfway point, the bright and unabashedly poppy title track, the beats-per-minute slow down a tad and everything gets heavier, to marvelous results. The classic thump of “Grease” is buoyed by Dwyer’s voice all high-pitched, harmonizing and cooing along with Dawson, then shouting over what sounds like a megaphone on the very next bar. “The Coconut” completely falls apart in the middle, leaving a few quiet and heavily-reverberated guitar murmurs to peek under the rocks before blasting back into the song’s knotty main riff, while “Maria Stacks” is much simpler by comparison, but has what is probably the best vocal melody on the entire record. Of course, this is the kind of stuff that gets Nuggets written all over it, but much of The Master’s Bedroom is blurrier, more acid-drenched. More a product of San Francisco than anywhere else in the world.
Download:
MP3: Thee Oh Sees – “Block of Ice”
MP3: Thee Oh Sees – “The Coconut”
