It’s scary to think that John Dwyer is maturing. Not just because he’s been at this racket-making racket for over 15 years now, but because his current outfit, Thee Oh Sees, has hit an oxymoronic equilibrium of garage-barf refinement-- a stable instability that only comes from grooming chaos as if it were your own child. In that sense, Dwyer couldn’t be prouder. The pride has led to the re-release of one of the stray wastrels of Dwyer’s back catalog: Hands on the Controls, the 2002 debut album by Coachwhips, his band immediately prior to Thee Oh Sees. The band lasted from 2001 to 2005, and in that time Dwyer grew in leaps in bounds from the noisenik animatronics of Pink and Brown and toward the cracked-skull songcraft of Thee Oh Sees.
Hands on the Controls was never issued on vinyl-- ironically, one of the greatest nil-fi recordings of the 00s only came out on CD-- but that’s being remedied now. Along with the sympathetic format comes six unreleased tracks laid down during the 2001 recording session that birthed Hands on the Controls. Twenty-five songs total seems a remarkable achievement for a two-day studio spurt, until you realize just how spastically these tracks came into being. More like shards of shattered glass than songs, “Wheelchair” and “That Bitch Is Gonna End Up Dead” draw blood as they drag themselves across the disc in minute-and-a-half slashes of minimal blues-punk that makes most minimal blues-punk sound like Wagner.
But there’s more to the mix than simply updating what Supercharger and the Spaceshits had done in the 90s. This was 2001, and viewed in that context, Dwyer-- and Hands on the Controls in particular-- could be seen as an emergency retoxification of garage rock in the wake of the Strokes and the White Stripes. Not that Coachwhips seemed to give a shit. But that was the point. The thought-blotting saxophone and fuzz-fried vocals of “These Things Belong to Someone Else” might as well have been a reclamation of the rudiments of caveperson primitivism. And they still could be.
Context aside, there’s a moronic, monomaniacal joy to Hands on the Controls that pushes it to the precipice of timelessness. This is a party in a studio with the tape rolling, no doubt about it, with all the in-jokes and wall-climbing that entails. “Mary Ann’s gonna sit this one out, ’cause this songs about her. [Belch.] ‘Mary Ann’,” is how Dwyer starts out the song “Mary Ann”, referring to the group’s organist Mary Ann McNamara. What follows is 59 seconds of the same numbskull riff played like a locked groove at the end of a Troggs 45. Dwyer’s only lyric: “Mary Ann”. Then it just stops, a love song yanked from the turntable. Later he begins “Wite Lites” by calling out, “John Harlow on drums!”-- as if the beat Harlow lays down was something more dazzling than what a food processor might have accomplished.
Those shout-outs, weird starts, loose threads, and dead ends are what make Hands on the Controls far more than the sum of its shrapnel. Of the previously unreleased tracks, “American and Europe Too” is the best premonition of what Dwyer would go on to do in Thee Oh Sees: pull together all these fragments of half-forgotten influences just long enough to take a blurry snapshot. It may be no coincidence that many of the six added tracks are among the heaviest and most pummeling of the repackaged Hands; “Not Gonna Make it Thru the Night” feels more like a still-steaming leftover from Pink and Brown, rather than the juicier, catchier nuggets that Dwyer would eventually start digging up. As a document of a chaos system in motion, Hands on the Controls is breathtaking; as a showcase for Dwyer’s emerging slop-psyche magnificence, it couldn’t sound more frighteningly vital.
