Warm Slime

Thee Oh Sees do not need you to keep up with them. In the last three years alone, they've released six full-lengths and a hailstorm of EPs, all of it under a maddening, search-engine confounding array of name spellings. From the OCS to the OhSees to Thee Oh Sees, John Dwyer-- the madman behind this unreasonably prolific project-- has molted band names like some rare endangered bird determined to shake off pursuers. This is catch-me-if-you-can behavi or, the maneuvering of someone determined to keep things small and weird.

Occasionally a band will rend open a prodigious black hole, an all-consuming void that sucks in their sound and spits it out with such righteous fury that it’s in danger of making the rest of their music redundant. It takes some nerve to push an act of such grand folly out into the world, especially when it tugs so many ideas to logical extremes, implicitly drawing a line under them in the process. Fortunately, former Coachwhips frontman John Dwyer appears to have been born into one of the Faraday cages built by scientist Michael Faraday in the 1800s to make machinery impervious to electromagnetic radiation. In short, he’s built Thee Oh Sees into a Teflon coated vessel that spews out countless records at a furious clip and plays live with such intensity that it feels like the band members have noticed the Doomsday Clock is about to strike midnight.