Well, that didn’t take long. As it turns out, the only thing Thee Oh Sees do more expediently than release new music is hiatuses. Less than five months after frontman John Dwyer told a hometown audience at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall that they wouldn’t be seeing the band in action for a while, Thee Oh Sees have reemerged with their eighth full-length record in six years (to say nothing of a 7" and split-EP stream that that presumably puts as great a strain on America’s vinyl pressing plants as Record Store Day). And despite the significant developments in Dwyer’s life so far this year—like moving to L.A. and reuniting his early 2000s scuzz-rock combo the Coachwhips at SXSW*—Drop* turns out to be the next logical step in the progression undertaken on 2013’s Floating Coffin and 2012’s Putrifiers II, further reconciling Thee Oh Sees once-oppositional motorik-punk pummel and psychedelic-pop whimsy into a feel-good fuzz-rock groove. If Dwyer's morning-after clarification of his onstage address didn't already defuse the uncertainty surrounding the Thee Oh Sees' future, the steady-as-she-goes nature of Drop renders the hiatus announcement a total blip non-event in the band's trajectory.
If anything, the increasingly refined, texturally detailed nature of their recent recordings—not to mention a way-lighter touring itinerary than usual—suggests that Thee Oh Sees weren’t so much pondering a break-up as a Beatles-circa-’66 shake-up, easing up on the relentless road show in favour of a more considered approach in the studio. Accordingly, the songs on Drop aren’t so much tailored to the band’s notoriously blitzkrieged, crowd-swarmed concerts as the all-night after-party. That’s not to suggest it’s an especially mellow record; the noise and chaos linger, but Dwyer and co. are in less of a hurry to unleash it, preferring to patiently zone out rather than freak out.
Coming on like the come-down successors to Putrifiers II rave-up “Lupine Dominus”, the early double-shot of “Encrypted Bounce” and “Savage Victory” counts as two of the band’s most entrancing tracks to date: the former distills the serrated psychedelia of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and airtight groove of Can’s “Mother Sky” into Nuggets-sized dimensions, while the latter taps into the same spectral spirit as the Rolling Stones’ ace acid-rock oddity “2000 Light Years From Home”. But even though such familiar record-collector reference points abound on Drop, the mischievous melodies and funhouse-mirrored guitar contortions render the results unmistakably Oh Sees. After introducing itself with a mellontroned refrain uncannily similar to Aerosmith’s “Dream On” (not that there’s anything wrong with that), “The King’s Noise” shows Dwyer to be as in thrall to the early-’70s canon of Bowie, Bolan, and Lennon as peers like Ty Segall and The Smith Westerns—though, unlike them, he punctuates each verse line of faux-Brit diction with a destabilizing Yes-like arpeggio. And despite its titular allusion to every brostepper’s favorite sound, “Drop” actually splits the difference between the Who’s maximum R&B and the Stooges’ Raw Power. (However, the Kinksian “Camera”—with its admission that “life is a camera and I cannot get near ya”—could very well be Dwyer’s dismissive comment on selfies.)
If Drop ultimately ranks a notch below its immediate predecessors in Thee Oh Sees’ discography, it’s for a couple of tracks that stick out as frivolous filler, like the repetitious, nursery-rhymed paisley pop of “Put Some Reverb on My Brother” and the drifting, synth-washed decadanse of “Transparent World”. But as per recent Thee Oh Sees tradition, the album comes to a peaceful balladic conclusion with the unabashedly Beatlesque “The Lens”, though in this case, it feels less like a strategic antidote to the anarchy that preceded it than a natural manifestation of Drop’s stress-free spirit. And yet, just when the song introduces a baroque harpsichord flourish grafted from the mid-section of “In My Life”, it comes to a swift conclusion, as if the band were embarrassed by this uncharacteristic indulgence. It just goes to show that, even at their most relaxed and reverential, Thee Oh Sees’ feisty, impulsive essence still cuts through loud and clear.
