WOO. BAH BAH BAH BAH. HA HA HA HA.
These are the sounds of Thee Oh Sees, interjections yelled in nearly all their songs. Loud. Expressive. Joyous.
The cover of Thee Oh Sees’ latest album, Floating Coffin, is the perfect representation of this sound. It displays bright red strawberries filtered over repeated pairs of menacing eyes. With every song by Thee Oh Sees, expect this kind of sweetness over spookiness. Expect catchy choruses about bloody children hidden under a guise of bright, psychedelic guitars.
Hailing from the same San Francisco garage rock scene as Ty Segall and Sic Alps, a fun but tired and homogenous scene, Thee Oh Sees are a band defined by pure prolificacy. Floating Coffin is their seventh record in five years(!). Their last album, Putrifiers II, released eight months ago(!!), saw them at their most fine-tuned, with carefully crafted—albeit slightly forced—garage pop tunes and old west influenced psych jams.
Floating Coffin is the same band, just a bit looser and a lot more stimulated. And that’s what makes this a great album. It’s a band, obviously concerned with putting out music as much as possible, that’s loosening up and playing what’s natural to them. It’s also a darker version of this band. Some of these songs are straight-up brooding, an emotion that’s not normally associated with their brand of effervescent hippie-influenced mania. It’s a subtle-yet-noteworthy change, and it’s really exciting to know Thee Oh Sees are still evolving after a seemingly exhausting output of music.
“Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster” is the catchiest and most typically Thee Oh Sees song on here; a psych-punk slacker jam for the dude bros of 2013. It’s the sound of T. Rex and Butthole Surfers partying together, with drums bashing, loud guitars bending and soft vocals soaring to wherever they feel like, man.
“No Spell” is another stunner. It’s a beautiful blend of acid-charged garage punk and krautrock. It’s initially soft, with a droning bass line and gentle melody sung in duet falsetto by guitarist John Dwyer and keyboardist Brigid Dawson and a simmering drum beat. By the end, the softness is broken by a “WOO!,” the music quickens and thrashing guitars take over. It shows even the calmest songs can be infiltrated with frenzy.
“Night Crawler” is the highlight of the album. If Thee Oh Sees has a sound, this is the furthest they’ve ever diverged from it. A stunning stomper of sludgy and spacey electronics, it’s both the creepiest and sexiest song they’ve ever made. The song is literally alien. It sounds like it’s transmitted from a spaceship, the vocals filtered through a hazy cosmic megaphone.
The demented, flute-driven “Tunnel Time” transitions beautifully into “Minotaur,” the closing track. “Minotaur” begins with a few slow notes from a cello and transforms into a trippy ballad, evocative of Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound girl groups and Roy Orbison’s proto-dream pop crooning. Like “Night Crawler,” it’s a different breed of Thee Oh Sees, still connected to their manic sound but drifting into new territory.
While Floating Coffin isn’t Thee Oh Sees’ masterpiece (see, arguably: Carrion Crawler/The Dream), it’s a great addition to their already-massive discography. It’s hardly an innovation, but it shows Thee Oh Sees going in some really cool, weird and continuously joyous directions. Floating Coffin is both a perfect representation of their sound, madness hidden beneath delirium, and at the same time an entirely new blueprint of it.
Rating: B
