​‘Mutilator Defeated’ a triumph of consistence for Thee Oh Sees

In a musical landscape ever-hungry for the Next Big Thing, artistic consistence is a severely underappreciated quality. The listening public, that fickle beast, wants bigger and better with an artist’s every passing album, but its back turns quickly when an artist moves faster than it can keep up. It’s an ugly game with few winners on either side of the stage.

With a gaggle of rock-solid studio and live albums, EPs, split-sevens and one-off compilation tracks tied to its name over the course of decade, California garage rock institution Thee Oh Sees is an anomaly in the music world’s flashy feeding frenzy. With an unmistakable sound that straddles the short line between leaden psychedelia and metronomic krautrock, the band has casually released excellent albums with perennial reliability.

Though its mind-melting sound may set Thee Oh Sees apart from the rest of the glue-sniffing pack, even a grizzled fan would have trouble differentiating a change of season within the band’s discography over the years. It may as well have shelved a hundred songs a decade ago only to dole them out in LP-sized morsels yearly, and few listeners would be the wiser.

And by God, nine proper studio albums in, the formula is still golden.

Rather than move up or outward, Thee Oh Sees’s “Mutilator Defeated at Last” finds the band sinking deeper into the proverbial pocket. The band’s trade has always been in groove above lyrics or melody, and it functions here with heavy-heeled, lockstep precision.

Barreling like a two-ton windup toy, drummer Nick Murray is the band’s unsung hero, as his beats and fills level forests to make way for singer/guitarist John Dwyer’s chasmal yelps and strong-armed riffs. Reaming through the brick-waveformed “Lupine Ossuary,” Murray’s octo-armed assaults are less bedrock for fuzzy space exploration than a taunt to the rest of the band to catch the hell up. The ensuing bpm one-upmanship is enough to earn the album a Surgeon General’s warning for the potential slaughter of headbanged-out brain cells.

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke; the subsequent “Sticky Hulks” is a needed breather, though the air’s far from fresh. Grooving menacingly around an incense-laden organ motif that would turn Deep Purple pink, Thee Oh Sees drive the song through a seven-minute death march. Even when the band hangs up its humbuckers, the group is helpless to rein in its muscly sensibilities, as it plows through the acoustic instrumental “Holy Smoke” with motorik abandon.

Bands live and die trying to reinvent “their sound” – or just as unsuccessfully rekindle their cooling coals of past success. If our yearly subscription to Thee Oh Sees’s pocket of wonders should remain so consistent, we ought to count our lucky stars.

KNDS 96.3 Suggests

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https://soundcloud.com/astronautalis/papillon-beat-by-lazerbeak-of-doomtree

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“Holy Rollers” – Shana Cleveland & The Sandcastles

The transition from surf queen (see above) to American Primitive guitar slinger may be striking to the casual fan, but considering her body of work outside of La Luz – most especially a deck of watercolor trading cards celebrating the “Obscure Giants of Acoustic Guitar” – Cleveland’s reintroduction with her tagalong band is a welcome deviation from her single-coil sound.
**Check them out on June 3 at The Aquarium

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