Thee Oh Sees do not need you to keep up with them. In the last three years alone, they've released six full-lengths and a hailstorm of EPs, all of it under a maddening, search-engine confounding array of name spellings. From the OCS to the OhSees to Thee Oh Sees, John Dwyer-- the madman behind this unreasonably prolific project-- has molted band names like some rare endangered bird determined to shake off pursuers. This is catch-me-if-you-can behavior, the maneuvering of someone determined to keep things small and weird.
It is also a very San Francisco-psych-band thing to do. Fellow Frisco garage-rock nerds Fresh & Onlys and Sic Alps operate at a similarly blinding pace, churning out a blizzard of new music that hits the same sweet spot over and over with single-minded fervor. For their followers, of course, there can never be enough; retro garage rock is a joyful hobbit hole unto itself, a cult that attracts new followers every year. For the unconverted, though, trying to pick through the pile of releases to determine what separates one from the next can be taxing. The result is a tight-knit community of musicians and fans hiding in plain sight, and one has to presume they like it that way.
On the surface, the latest Oh Sees dispatch is only minutely distinguishable from 2009's Help-- or, for that matter, 2009's Dog Poison. But, like all musical niches, spend enough time there and the shades of gray start to separate into a color spectrum. Thee Oh Sees have always been a little weirder than most of their peers; one gets the sense, from their warped production and high, childlike vocals, that both the recording equipment and the members have spent a little too much time in the sun. The title track, which opens the record, bursts out of the gate with three minutes of straightforward garage before downshifting into an extended, one-note bass vamp that throbs in place for seven straight minutes. It's an appropriate way into the record: if you can hang with us through this, they seem to say, you're cool for the rest of the ride.
The rest of Warm Slime immediately opens up into the bite-size garage-pop they're more known for. "I Was Denied" and "Castiatic Tackle", in particular, are wild-eyed, hard-driving rockers. But that thick, muddy soup of sound surfaces repeatedly: first in the flat-horizon stomp of "Everything Went Black" and again in "Flash Bats", which is mired in so much goop that the song buried miles beneath it feels implied. Even for a committedly lo-fi aesthetic, Warm Slime is rough going at times; listening to it back-to-back with the relatively cleaner Help is startling, like blasting a bug-spattered windshield with a jet of wiper fluid. If Warm Slime is one of their least ingratiating records this far, Dwyer and his cohorts surely don't care overmuch; besides, there is almost certainly another Oh Sees full-length being wrapped up as I finish typing this sentence.
