An Odd Entrances arrived fast, even by Thee Oh Sees standards. The Bay Area-born psych band has always worked at a feverish clip—at least an album a year, in additions to shelves of singles, EPs, rarities and miscellany—but their 18th and latest studio full-length follows its predecessor A Weird Exits by a mere three months (for the truly impatient fan, they’d also released a live album just a month before that one). The band has reached the point where their prolificacy has become a kind of performance art, an experiment in how much worthwhile product one group can deliver without releasing an outright dud. Though it’s not a force of nature like the other LPs Thee Oh Sees have produced since returning from their farcically brief 2013 hiatus, Odd Entrances more than keeps their streak alive.
Making the most of the band’s new, double-drummer lineup, A Weird Exits was a concussive dropkick of a record, as focused and ruthlessly efficient as a wood chipper. It didn’t even pause for any of the woozy, psych-pop numbers that frontman John Dwyer usually smuggles onto each record, and now we know why: He was saving them for this one. Recorded during the same sessions, An Odd Entrances is a kinder, gentler companion to its shredding predecessor (“an appendix, if you will,” according to the liner notes), a clearinghouse for all the tangents and detours that would have dulled that record’s fierceness. It’s got riffs—opener “You Will Find It Here” is an absolute beast—but for the most part Entrances doesn’t try to melt your face. It just wants to hang out a bit, maybe split a joint and stare at the sky before calling it an early night.
Three of these six songs are leisurely instrumentals, one of them, “Jammed Exit,” a direct continuation of Exits’ trippiest number, “Jammed Entrance.” The tracks share the same Krautrock groove, except this time a wayward flute scribbles all over it. Like much of Entrances, it feels like a record collector’s in joke—a nod, perhaps, to the Blues Project’s Projections, or maybe some forgotten Nuggets-era deep cut. Other references are less obscure. “The Poem” is pure Magical Mystery Tour, right down its spacey prose and melted-taffy strings, while “At the End, on the Stairs” conjures a Donovan-esque blur of paisley and incense. Then “Nervous Tech (Nah John)” ends the record as it began, with another percolating jam that lets both of the drummers get some.
Much to the exasperation of newcomers looking for a consensus entry point into their endless discography, Thee Oh Sees have been so astonishingly consistent that few of their records tower far above (or for that matter fall far below) any other. An Odd Entrances is the rare effort from the band that clearly announces itself as a lesser work. Even at just half an hour long, it’s so disconnected that it feels more like an odds-and-ends collection than the group’s actual odds and ends compilations. Casual fans can take a guilt-free pass on this one, then, but as always, the group’s insatiable base won’t have any reason to regret placing their pre-orders. If A Weird Exits was Thee Oh Sees’ Thanksgiving feast, An Odd Entrances is Friday’s turkey and stuffing sandwich—hardly a destination meal, but plenty satisfying in its own way.
