This year, John Dwyer is celebrating 20 years of Thee Oh Sees by going back to the project’s roots—albeit not in any musical sense. Rather, Dwyer has revived his bygone tradition of randomly tweaking the group’s name on a whim. For their 19th full-length album, the band formerly known as Thee Oh Sees (and The Oh Sees and OCS and Orinoka Crash Suite and Orange County Sound) are now just plain ol’ Oh Sees, a move that doesn’t so much herald a new phase as retroactively rebrand the one they’ve been establishing for the past two years. When Dwyer dissolved the long-running Petey Dammit/Brigid Dawson/Mike Shoun iteration of the band in 2013, he seemed to pick up right where he left off. But on a recent string of releases with a double-drummer formation, Dwyer and co. have gradually drifted further and further away from Thee Oh Sees’ garage-punk and psych-pop tent poles into more ephemeral spaces.
With Orc, the band consolidate the strengths of their joint 2016 releases, A Weird Exits and An Odd Entrances, streamlining their grab-bag experimentation into a more fluid flow and quasi-conceptual framework (well, at least as much as we can assume its fantastical references to castles, warriors, and beasts are somehow connected). Here, the shred-ready opener “The Static God” isn’t just another case of Oh Sees doing their motorik-maniac act, but rather a last-blast rocket ride to parts unknown, its stratosphere-breaching velocity eventually cooled by a cloud-parting organ drone that hints at the more patiently paced music to come.
The song also sees Dwyer adopt a campier, glam-kissed vocal tone. Throughout the record, he sounds as eager to mess around with his singing as the music: the glorious, steamrolling sludge of “Animated Violence” is the closest Oh Sees have ever gotten to metal, with Dwyer dropping comically Gene Simmons-esque growls in between gleaming Thin Lizzy arpeggios. But there is perhaps no better gauge of Oh Sees’ recent evolution than the mid-album colossus “Keys to the Castle.” From the outset, it follows the familiar Oh Sees battle plan of pitting a propulsive rhythm and mischievous melody against shocks of guitar fuzz that double as de facto choruses. Then, two minutes in, it dissolves into a mesmerizing extended coda of cloudy organ tones and snake-charming strings that gradually lull the song to a blissful rest past the eight-minute mark.
In fact, “Keys to the Castle” is such an entrancing set piece that it effectively casts a hazy-headed spell over the rest of the album. At 50 minutes, Orc is a good 15 minutes longer than the average Oh Sees record. And in the album’s second act, you can start to feel the extra weight, particularly when they slip into the drowsy, slow-motion prog of “Cadaver Dog” and “Drowned Beast.” Both boast the sort of madcap, theatrically rendered narratives that Dwyer’s protégés in King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are currently executing with more delirious energy.
But Orc also blows open some intriguing new paths forward: “Cooling Tower” recasts Can’s “Mushroom” as some bizarre-world children’s TV show theme, its doomy groove brightened by sundazed Stereolab-style hums, while “Paranoise” is a jittery Afrobeat jam further destabilized by buzzing synth frequencies and Dwyer’s spookily hiccupped vocals. And with the closing instrumental “Raw Optics,” Oh Sees prove that aforementioned Afro-funk excursion is no random one-off experiment, but a reliable rhythmic foundation that can fuse seamlessly with their signature garage-psych sound. By the time Orc winds down with the most chilled dueling drum solo ever, Oh Sees’ random name change starts to make more sense—as this band continues to travel further toward rock’s outer limits, definite articles just seem like unnecessary baggage.
