Oh Sees

Orc

The expansive, wandering Orc—with its pastoral arrangements; long, proggy jams; and heavy-metal guitar licks—represents a relative change of pace, fully exploring the band’s heavier, ruminative sounds amid more familiar tics.

Despite all of the quixotic ups and downs in the tunes the album never loses its sense of purpose or momentum.

While previous Oh Sees tunes have tended toward explorations of mood, spread out over a krautrock-scented riff or two, here individual songs find themselves bursting at the seams with ideas.

Generally, there’s something quite tainted about the sound of the album in its entirety, like an evil pleasure bubbling under the surface.

Fans who have joined the ride at some point in the past 20 years will no doubt be delighted with the dense, stomping chapter found in Orc, though newcomers might feel like they've wandered into a story very much in progress and may be more compelled by some of the band's earlier records.

‘ORC’ is exactly what you’d expect. That’s not to say it’s predictable - not in the slightest - but the band have built up a reputation for crafting mad canvases of sound, full of wild solos and narcotic energy. This album is no different on that front.

No matter what shape or form the songs take, they are driven by Dwyer's non-stop energy and the band's uncanny ability to transmit it through the speakers like sparks from a live wire.

(Thee) Oh Sees is a well-oiled psych rock machine on Orc.

Orc is another immensely satisfying offering from one of underground rock’s modern heroes.

With Orc, the band consolidate the strengths of their joint 2016 releases, A Weird Exits and An Odd Entrances, streamlining their grab-bag experimentation into a more fluid flow and quasi-conceptual framework.

On Orc, their nineteenth album in 14 years, the formula has to some extent been abandoned, and the effect is not necessarily what those urging for the change were hoping for.