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Album Review: Thee Oh Sees - Warm Slime

  • Written by  Antonio Tzikas

John Dwyer must be one of the most prolific artists this century, this being the 11th full length studio album from his San Francisco outfit Thee Oh Sees amidst a sea of singles and EPs. The only other person who releases music comparatively frequently is Anton Newcombe and like Anton, John Dwyer does things his own way, which must be a pretty good way if Warm Slime is anything to by.

As with last year's offering Help, summery garage/psych vibes are on the agenda once again as the band smash out another thirty minutes of lo-fi surf bliss for our listening pleasure. This effort, more-so than other earlier recordings by this band, will blow your head to bits. Listening to Warm Slime is like listening to a condensed Nuggets or Pebbles comp with only the real mind-bending freak-outs left in and makes me want to smash up my room and eat the cat raw. Yeah sure, it's only seven songs long but the whole of the first side is taken up by a 14 minute trip of epic proportions…think 'Sister Ray' but without a migraine setting in half way through.

Putting the centrepiece at the beginning of this record was good move because after it's over we get blasted into garage scuzz heaven as The Oh Sees smash through the remaining 15 minutes with six more electrified songs packed full of wild fuzz, killer riffs and in the case of 'Flash Bats', seriously cool bass grooves. The tunes hiding under the blanket of lo-if hiss that characterises the US indie scene at the moment are all great songs brimming with a supercharged energy that can only be captured by recording live.

There’s a lot of ‘60s influences present here such as Barrett era Floyd instrumentation on ‘Everything Went Black’ and ‘MT Work’ and retro sounding reverb and echo effects throughout the record that instantly remind me of ’60s psych melter ‘Suzy Creamcheese’ by Teddy & His Patches. Anyone who has been on the band's Myspace recently will have heard 'I Was Denied' before - this tune really exhibits the bands brilliance as it hurtles along on a boppy garage riff into a tunnel of noise and back out again like a more upbeat No Age whilst highlight 'Mega-Feast' just, well, it just fucking shreds.

The relatively short tracklist has resulted in there being no weak songs on the album - seven tunes is the perfect amount when they’re all this good and make for a record you can play all the way through that doesn’t even come close to being even slightly boring for a single second of its running time. The greatest thing about this band is that after one album you only have to wait around 6 months instead of three years for another release from them, as they seem intent on releasing every song they’ve ever written (luckily all their songs are good). They could very well turn out to be one of those bands that become the stuff of legend in years to come, after most other lo-fi hipsters disappear with only a 9.5 review somewhere in the Pitchfork archives to prove they ever existed.

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