No need to get John Dwyer's lawyers on the phone. This is still, for all intents and purposes, the same band that has gone by minutely different handles such as OCS and TheOhsees and The Oh Sees. On the surface, this would seem like (sigh) OCD; jokes about that TV show are pretty much hacks-only at this point, and if Dwyer isn't particularly happy with what we thought of his last album, it's still showing up at the bottom anyway. But on The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In, consider it a flare gun signaling an impending about-face, as the undercooked folk of 2006 release The Cool Death Of Island Raiders is jettisoned for an album of a very particular sort of desert summer, as influenced by oil stains and scorched blacktop every bit as much as gutbucket garage and primordial rock.
Master's Bedroom conjures vast stretches of I-10 through the Inland Empire, with an occasional heat-stroke mirage along the way (the true-to-title "Graveyard Drug Party"). And while this territory conjures wanderlust-induced drives that are often romanticized, in reality, you can go for dozens and dozens of miles without feeling like you've gone anywhere. It's a natural result of Dwyer mostly working in two gears, namely rough & tumble or tough & rumble.
Ostensibly, the intent was to create a simulacrum of 1960s Bay Area psychedelics without the marathon solos, and in its own way, Master's Bedroom can be as hypnotic and mesmeric as any drone album. Stephen Merritt might be the only guy relying on fuzz more heavily in 2008, but while Distortion used its namesake to clash with an obvious melodic microstructure, Dwyer's work is more suited for muscle cars and barbecues than headphones. If you don't have access to the credits, you'd have no idea Dave Sitek worked on three of these tracks.
Despite splitting between Sitek and A-Frames guy Chris Woodhouse, Master Bedroom manages to be a consistent record, albeit to a fault at some points. Working in a frequency band this narrow is liable to produce slump or two over the span of 15 tracks-- the rubber band melody in "Block of Ice" is an instant pleasure, an imagining of what The B-52's might sound like from a passing car. But halfway through the album (particularly on "Ghost in the Trees") it feels like we've already heard it three different times in some minor variation and the megaphone effect on Dwyer's vocals doesn't make the lyrics particularly effective milemarkers; this is how the words "block of ice" end up sounding more like "fuck all night."
Yet, all this "but is it art?" talk is rendered inappropriate when you consider this record's just so goddamn fun and loosey-goosey that by comparison, the Black Keys sound like Interpol-- tellingly, nearly every single track begins with a count-off, the sound of a guitar plugging in or some in media res feedback. Usually, that's a cheap ploy for a band to feign garage "authenticity" while recording in a $500-an-hour studio, but here it feels like the natural entry to songs that have Thee Oh Sees getting their hands muddy and surprising themselves when they strike oil; listen to how the Nuggets-style title track unexpectedly powerlifts its hook, and it's difficult to hear it any other way.
