All Your Favorite Indie Bands Are Now Jam Bands

Oh Sees at Variety Playhouse, September 2017

For well over a decade now, Oh Sees (aka Thee Oh Sees, The OCs, OCS, etc.) have been one of the best bands around, certainly the best band from the California Republic.  

From at least 2005 until about 2015, they prolifically released consistently fine albums of their trademark, fast-paced Oh Sees' sound.  Their psychobilly- influenced punk rock was always instantly recognizable as Thee Oh Sees, but it always sounded fresh and never felt formulaic.  

But sometime around 2015 or so, frontman John Dwyer decided he wanted to change things up a bit, so in addition to even more permutations of the band name, they started including elements of 60s acid rock, krautrock, metal, prog, whatever came to Dwyer's stream-of-consciousness mind.  The resulting sound was still recognizable as Oh Sees once you realized it was them, but they wouldn't have been your first guess in a blindfold test.

"Long guitars solos are boring," was a maxim of the punk movement since at least the late 70s, but instead of avoiding them, Dwyer started leaning in and exploring them.  For example, here's the spare Nervous Tech from 2016's An Odd Entrances.

Their latest LP, Face Stabber, takes this trend even further, including a 21-minute track called Henchlock that sounds like it could have been recorded in 1969 (had Dwyer and the Oh Sees been around then).  It's one of the most psychedelic pieces of music we've heard in a long time, and despite its length, it's so well composed and moves so logically from one passage to the next, that it feels like only half that length (still a long song though). But basically, it's primarily an extended guitar odyssey, the very thing punk had once rejected.  Had this come over the airwaves and played on our FM radio back in the 60s, it would have rendered Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and the whole Haight-Ashbury/Summer of Love sound obsolete.  It would have ruled.

One of the best bands around, improbably and almost impossibly,  somehow just got even better.