In stark defiance of pop music’s “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” maxim, John Dwyer believes the best antidote to boredom is getting rid of the chorus altogether. Rather than introduce a rousing, anthemic melody to elevate a song to the next level, Dwyer takes the shortcut to ecstasy: after riding a relentless robo-punk rhythm through a couple of creepily cooed verses, he simply screams “wooo!,” and uses his fuzzbox as a springboard into the stratosphere. At this point in the band’s 11-album run, you can pretty much set your watch to this maneuver—A Weird Exits’ pulsating opener, “Dead Man’s Gun,” dutifully triggers its strobe-lit squall at the 40-second mark. But the trick never fails to exhilarate, because Thee Oh See’s blast-off moments never feel like smooth, assured ascents—they’re more like riding a whirling fairground attraction and realizing your safety belt has come unlatched.
Even as recent albums have introduced stoner-prog jams and Mellotron-swirled ballads into the mix, Thee Oh Sees have become, as John Peel famously quipped about the Fall, one of those “always different, always the same” kinda bands. With each hastily released album, you’re guaranteed a healthy dose of the band’s patented motorik mayhem, but in Thee Oh Sees’ case, that signature sound is no dead end—it functions more as a home base from which the band can confidently roam and to which it can safely circle back. A Weird Exits doesn’t make any surprise detours like Drop’s Beatlesque lullaby “The Lens” or Mutilator Defeated At Last’s psych-folk pastorale “Holy Smoke”; rather than slam on the brakes and pull a U, it gradually eases off the accelerator. But while raygunned rave-ups like “Gelatinous Cube” will keep the stagedivers busy at the band’s legendarily unhinged live shows, more than ever, Thee Oh Sees show an eagerness to drift away from their foundational ’60s psych-pop and garage-punk roots into more cosmic realms. And, as this album proves, you can venture even further afield when you have two drummers powering the ship.
A Weird Exits is Thee Oh Sees’ first LP to showcase the double-thump tandem of Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon, whose interplay naturally encourages a greater degree of rhythmic variation. While Krautrock remains the driving force in Thee Oh Sees machine, the guiding spirit here is more Jaki Liebezeit than Klaus Dinger, with a premium on loose, limber mid-tempo grooves instead of locked-in momentum. That balming effect can be felt even on a windmilled exercise like “Plastic Plant,” which has all the qualities of a classic Oh Sees rocker, yet opts for a cool shuffle instead of a full-torque thrust. But the double-barreled attack is most potent on the instrumentals: the punnily titled “Jammed Entrance” etches a squiggly morse-code keyboard pattern into a mushroom-heady funk; the jazzy guitar refrains of “Unwrap the Fiend Pt. 2” give way to a taut, tambourine-shakin’ strut and phased-out solo that open up a vast, spectral sense of space. (By contrast, the droning eight-minute reverie “Crawl Out From the Fall Out,” doesn’t give the drummers much to do other than tentatively tap their cymbals, but then its swirling, lung-engulfing Spacemen 3-via-“Ode to Street Hassle” haze is too thick to encourage much muscle movement.)
As Thee Oh Sees are wont to do, they close A Weird Exits with a slow dance—though it’s the rare one in their canon to push the VU meter to the same extremes as their high-octane ragers. With its mournful, church-organ melody, “The Axis” initially waltzes in like a dirtbag “Whiter Shade of Pale,” the romantic yearning replaced by scathing anti-sentiment (“Don’t you know how much / I don’t love you”). But, in its dying moments, Dwyer unleashes a squealing, distorted guitar solo: Even when their pendulum is swinging at a steadier pace, Thee Oh Sees still have the power to hypnotize—but from its twitchy jams to its blown-out power ballads, A Weird Exits’ most intriguing moments come when they break the trance.
