Osees can be a forbidding proposition, even for longtime followers of John Dwyer’s garage-psych armada. Beyond his infamously relentless rate of output (and all the frequent rebrandings and extracurricular pursuits he’s initiated along the way), Dwyer’s music is actually becoming more caustic and confrontational as time goes on. Over the past decade, Osees have reinvented themselves as prog-metal warriors, hardcore agitators, and synth-punk freaks, investing each new permutation with the same degree of blitzkrieg aggression. And while they’re no strangers to bizarro artwork, their recent album covers have proven to be particularly potent nightmare fuel—for a rock band, they make for a great horror-movie franchise.
The cover of Osees’ latest album, OFF COURSE, presents us with another uncanny array of demonic soldiers, skeleton kings, and disembodied hands—but in this case, it’s a bit of misdirection. Defying their recent track record of extreme aesthetic makeovers, the album—which dropped earlier this month with no advance notice—marks a reset, embracing the more fluid, improvisatory approach of records like 2016’s A Weird Exits and 2017’s Orc, back when the double-drummer iteration of the band was still settling into place. (As Dwyer put it in the new record’s accompanying liners, “We jammed and jammed and jammed.”) But as much as Dwyer remains the group’s center of gravity, the album really belongs to bassist Tim Hellman and twin stick-handlers Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone, whose Tago-via-Lagos grooves serve as the magic carpet that their frontman can ride into the sun.
OFF COURSE often sounds like the sort of album that’s being written on the spot, and that’s precisely what makes it such a thrill: You can feel Dwyer fall under the spell of his band’s hypnotic forward motion at the same time you’re doing the same. The epic title track initially presents itself as a doom-psych successor to Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine,” but after six minutes of dodging asteroids and solar flares, Dwyer finds his bliss in the unlikeliest of places: a chirpy melodic passage that sounds a lot like Supergrass’ feel-good classic “Alright.” At other times, Dwyer gets so lost in the groove, he gets absorbed into it. While hotstepping his way around the funk undertow and jazzy organ interjections of “Hecate’s Reflection Is a Trick,” he locks into a “left/right” chant that initially makes him sound like the world’s creepiest fitness instructor, before his ping-ponging vocal tic becomes a percussive device unto itself.
Those two frontloaded tracks account for over half of the album’s total runtime, and I wish they’d let the tape roll longer on more succinct pieces like “Syringe,” which starts out as a noble attempt to fold Can’s motorik-machine side into their speaking-in-tongues/avant-splatter side, but disintegrates after three minutes, before it can truly take flight. But even in its messiest moments, OFF COURSE foregrounds a sense of playfulness that’s been largely snuffed out by the berserker attack of the Osees’ more recent records.
It’s been a while since the band has delivered a track as unabashedly joyful as “The Trick,” whose wiggy ’60s go-go shuffle tees up a carnivalesque keyboard pattern from Tom Dolas that’s practically “Chopsticks”-like in its giddy simplicity. It’s the song where OFF COURSE’s jam-session spirit feels most palpable—it’s easy to picture the smiles on everyone’s faces as they lock into the same spiralling progression and push to see how long they can keep it going before losing control. By contrast, the album’s grand finale, “The Brute on His Knees,” feels like it came out of a completely different era of Osees, with Dwyer seizing the spotlight to deliver a campy, curtain-closing ballad that suggests a goth “Whiter Shade of Pale” (at least until he fires off one of his face-melting solos). But, coming at the end of an album that’s otherwise governed by an egalitarian teamwork-makes-the-dream-work ethos, the moment feels a bit like letting the boss take the last-call karaoke number as the office holiday party winds down—an indulgence well earned.
