When OCS originated in 1997, it was the music of a goblin. That’s what John Dwyer recently likened his younger self to on Marc Maron’s “WTF?” podcast, explaining how all the recreational drugs he took alongside his singing-saw-playing friend Patrick Mullins—with the curious goal of creating “the quietest songs we could”—would render him constantly breathing through his mouth. Yes, the writhing, bug-eyed garage-rock band known most frequently as Thee Oh Sees was for many early years a whispering freak-folk expedition. Plenty of other things have since changed for Dwyer. His track record at that time told a story of several diverse endeavors rather than the one of an exhaustingly prolific primary project, for which he’s now known. And, as the 43-year-old will tell you today, he’s dialed back his drugs.
For the project’s 20th LP in 20 years (and the 100th album for Dwyer’s own Castle Face Records), he returns to both its original name stylization and restrained aura for the first time in over a decade. Memory of a Cut Off Head essentially leaves the amps at home. Instead, it reverses hard into baroque, acoustic, and otherwise more delicate songs of a softer, slower psychedelic vein. The intensity, much like the spelling, is reduced by 70%.
If Memory is another new page for OCS, it is the special-thanks page. Coming amid a fast-as-ever recording clip—that’s four Dwyer LPs in 16 months, a merciless pace even for him—Memory honors the project’s history. It acknowledges strains of folk music that are less obviously fundamental to shaping the wilder iterations of Thee Oh Sees, and it honors some of the people who helped shape their store. There are horn arrangements by his friend and pupil Mikal Cronin. Memory also marks the returns of Mullins on singing saw and singer/keyboardist Brigid Dawson, the closest complementing presence Dwyer has ever had in the band. The album is as much hers as it is his, and she takes the reins on its superior second half.
Dwyer’s own songs run into a predictable problem. His signature restlessness tends to enhance the Oh Sees’ concussion-inducing material; for the past 10+ years, it’s sometimes seemed like the faster Thee Oh Sees produce, the harder they hit. The approach doesn’t work such wonders here. Memory’s concept demands patience, which is not exactly Dwyer’s natural element for writing. While Memory gives him the opportunity to drop his guitar and pick up the electric bagpipes and flute, its songs either come up short of compelling, or he stops them short. In the moments when he and Dawson harmonize together again, like on “On and On Corridor” or the opening title track, textures and voices come close to clicking into place. But the only songs that sound natural from this eerily hushed world are by Dawson alone, like her ghostly “The Fool” and its lonely woodwind backdrop.
Such an abrupt, massive tonal swing between efforts is not an unfamiliar move for Dwyer. One of the reasons he conceived OCS as an ultra-quiet project in the first place was because his prior band, Coachwhips, devoured noise. But as he recounted in the “WTF?” interview, “It incorporated over time more and more members, and the music changed, and now we’re at this rock’n’roll show.” All of those past and present members are now the spine of a 20-year-old San Francisco institution. On Memory of a Cut Off Head, Dawson once again proves to be its best friend.
