The Coachwhips, formed in San Francisco by
deranged vocalist John Dwyer, half of the duo Pink & Brown,
took the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's
distorted garage-rock to the punk-rock extremes of the
raucous frenzied orgy of Get Yer Body Next Ta Mine (Narnack, 2003),
an energetic parade of short sonic blisters such as
Hey Stiffie and 1000 Years.
Bangers Vs Fuckers (Narnack, 2004) applies the punk aesthetics borrowed
from the Germs to the sound of garages at large,
flipping through the glorious pages of
Gun Club (You Gonna Get it),
Jon Spencer (I Knew Her She Knew Me)
and
Cramps (Extinguish Me, Harlow's Muscle of Love)
in a few breathless minutes.
Peanut Butter and Jelly (Narnack, 2005) is not the overdose of
rock'n'roll that its predecessors were. In fact, it boasts only a few songs
that justify its format as a full-length album: Body and Brains, I Made A Bomb, Did You Cum?.
The rest is filler. This should have been an EP.
Double Death (Narnack, 2006) collects rarities.
John Dwyer's side-project OCS
(Orinoka Crash Suite)
was devoted to
minimal bedroom folk and blues for acoustic guitar and found noises:
the double-CD Orinoka Crash Suite (tUMULt, 2003), including a disc of
acoustic guitar and a full disc of free-form noise
(18 Reasons To Love Your Hater To Death),
the double-CD 2 (Narnack, 2004), that collects material from 2001 to 2003,
and the double-CD 3 & 4 (NArnack, 2005).
Renamed Thee Oh Sees, John Dwyer's solo project first moved towards psychedelic
music with The Cool Death Of Island Raiders (Narnack, 2006),
and then rapidly turned towards old-fashioned garage-rock with
Sucks Blood (2007) and
The Masters's Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In (Tomlab, 2008).
John Dwyer
was also active in Dig That Body Up It's Alive and Zeigenbock Kopf.
He also ventured into free jazz with Swords & Sandals.
Thee Oh Sees' prolific career continued with the mediocre power-pop of
Sucks Blood (Castle Face, 2009)
and
Dog Poison (Captured Tracks, 2009), on which he played all instruments
by himself,
while
Zork's Tape Bruise (Kill Shaman, 2009) collected leftovers.
At best,
Help (In The Red, 2009) reinvented garage-rock by experimenting with
all sorts of hybrid formats.
Enemy Destruct combines the panzer attack of Blue Cheer and the acid vocals of Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
Ruby Go Home is a Cramps-ian psychobilly that decays into a David Peel-esque hoe-down.
Meat Step Lightly blends pow-wow drumming, bubblegum refrain,
distorted riffs and Jethro Tull-ian flute.
The surreal Destroyed Fortress Reappears is a singalong for
kindergarten propelled by power riffs and massive drumming.
Like most of their albums, this should have been a four-song EP.
Nonetheless, Thee Oh Sees did not hesitate to issue more releases.
Warm Slime (In The Red, 2010), recorded with a real band, contains the 13-minute Warm Slime, an exhilarating cow-punk dance,
demonic rave-ups like I was Denied and Mega-feast
and Flash Bats, drenched in guitar noise.
Castlemania (2011) and the EP Carrion Crawler/The Dream (2011) were
polar opposites. The former is still an unfocused and intimate work.
On the latter Thee Oh Sees finally matured as a band.
Carrion Crawler is a cosmic ditty reminiscent of Syd Barrett-era
Pink Floyd with a solo of guitar feedback
worthy of Jimi Hendrix.
Contraption/Soul Desert beats all their previous
garage-rock rave-ups with a manic progression a` la
Velvet Underground and psychotic vocals a` la
Suicide.
The even more propulsive The Dream, their artistic peak, is pure
feverish hysteria, adorned with virginal falsetto singing
like Renaissance church boys joining a Teutonic zombie dance.
The spaced-out ballad Robber Barons flies high with the
anthemic overtones of vintage Jefferson Airplane.
The jazz and soul accents that percolate through the songs surface in the
instrumental shuffle Chem-Farmer.
Opposition is a brief poppy punkish fit.
The raw and groovy psychobilly Crushed Grass turns to their favorites of the Pacific Northwest (Sonics, Raiders).
The slow death dance Crack In Your Eye is littered with
shamanic yowls and mindbending distorions.
Heavy Doctor links the Syd Barrett-ian melodies, the deranged new wave
vocals, and the atmospheric solo guitar of the early 1960s.
This EP beats anything the Coachwhips or the Thee Oh Sees had ever done.
Singles Vol. 1 & 2 (Castle Face, 2011) collects all of the Oh Sees singles.
Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion (Burger Records) documents live performances.
Wax Face, which sounds like the Hawkwind playing the
Who's My Generation,
was the main addition to the
Thee Oh Sees canon on
Putrifiers II (2012).
This disappointing, mellow, spineless collection tries different genres without
excelling in either, from the bubblegum pop of Flood's New Light to the
baroque elegy Wicked Park via the lame jangling Goodnight Baby.
One can save the
propulsive Lupine Dominus (with hysterical organ riffing) and
the tortured and faux decadent So Nice that sounds like a cover of the
Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs.
Floating Coffin (2013) is their best contribution to punk-rock.
The pulsating, hysterical I Come From The Mountain sounds like the Gun Club with the Velvet Underground's drummer.
The psychobilly rave-ups of Strawberries 1+2 and Tunnel Time are de-facto tributes to the Cramps.
Drop (2014) opens with the stoner-rock a` la Blue Cheer of Penetrating Eye
(with the riff of Joan Jett's I Love Rock & Roll), but its bulk is languid
spineless ballads and dirges, with only the
neoclassical cello-driven The Lens being remarkable.
A new line-up recorded Mutilator Defeated At Last (2015): Dwyer, bassist Tim Hellman, Nick Murray on drums, Chris Woodhouse on synth and mellotron, and Brigid Dawson on backing vocals.
Their garage-rock bangers (Poor Queen, Rogue Planet) are becoming too predictable, and in fact they try new avenues, like
the whispered sinister swamp-rock of Web,
and
Sticky Hulks, which combines Procol Harum's A White Shade of Pale and early Pink Floyd.
Best is Lupine Ossuary, a
Jimi Hendrix-ian bacchanal with
Black Sabbath-ian vocals.
A Weird Exits (2016), the first album with the double drumming of
Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon,
tries to move away from their (ever more predictable) rockers with "experimental" compositions such as the instrumentals Jammed Entrance and
Unwrap The Fiend Pt 2, but the
eight-minute acid jam Crawl Out Into The Fall Out is too languid and
anemic.
An Odd Entrances (2016) collects leftovers from the sessions of
A Weird Exits, mostly childish "experiments".
An increasingly notable presence is keyboardist Tomas "Mr Elevator" Dolas.
Renamed Oh Sees, and having replaced Moutinho with Paul Quattrone, the band
returned to its original roots on Orc (2017) with
the frenzied and poppy garage-rock of The Static God
and the hard-rock jamming of Jettisoned, while better tweaking the
interstellar instrumentals Paranoise and Raw Optics.
On the other hand, the metal Animated Violence and the
eight-minute prog-rock suite Keys to the Castle show that
multi-stylistic ambitions have a limit.
The 22-minute single Dead Medic (2017) further expanded their instrumental jamming with cerebral Can-like alienation, jazzy lines, extraterrestrial keyboard sounds, and a lengthy sleepy bluesy coda.
The Oh Sees moved decisively towards jazzy prog-rock on
Smote Reverser (2018).
The 12-minute Anthemic Aggressor sits
somewhere between Motorpsycho and
Can. Although
the meandering eight-minute Last Peace shows their compositional limits,
they clearly constitute a solid instrumental unit.
Nonetheless, the album also contains their most virulent rock'n'roll number ever, Overthrown, which is almost grindcore.
The sprawling Face Stabber (2019) leans even more heavily towards
1970s prog-rock.
Fu Xi is reminiscent of both Soft Machine's jazz-rock and Can's math-rock.
The 14-minute Scutum & Scorpius blends elements from
Yes,
King Crimson and
Popol Vuh (alas, with too much guitar
soloing).
The 21-minute Henchlock (2019) is reminiscent of
Soft Machine's Facelift,
of Can's Halleluwa,
of Colosseum's Valentyne Suite,
and even of the Ten Years After's guitar
acrobatics.
There are still a handful of bursts of punk-rock, notably the
Butthole Surfers-esque
Gholu, and the loud emphatic
Bad Religion-esque head-banger
Heartworm, but these sound dated compared with
the eight-minute The Daily Heavy, which sounds like a sophisticated
remix of the Ramones' Lobotomy
by Suicide.
This album marked a veritable resurrection for Dwyer.
The all-electronic album The 12" Synth (2019) contains two 20-minute compositions credited to the Osees, which are John Dwyer (ostensibly under the influence of LSD) and Tomas Dolas.
Infinite Columns is little more than a neurotic loop of dirty drones that takes twelve minutes to populate with some cosmic fluttering synth
Regards To The Monolith begins like a chaotic exercise of
electroacoustic music and then evolves into gothic droning.
These is amateurish electronica made by senile hippies.
As Damaged Bug, the hyper-prolific John Dwyer has released the electronic albums Hubba Bubba (2014), Cold Hot Plumbs (2015) and Bunker Funk (2017), besides a Michael Yonkers tribute album, Bug On Yonkers (2020).