A Thee Oh Sees

Yep that's right, Johnny Dwyer and his crew have returned, losing an 'H' on the way but dropping yet another impossibly amazing slice of intergalactic psychedelic fun for all. It's easy to think it's yet another album from this crew but believe us when we tell you - this one's a fucking belter! You've probably heard the hooky as hell 'Dreary Nonsense' by now in all it's one minute thirty five second glory but this lil' puppy's got a whole load more to give. Thirteen magic moments here - from the noisy as hell 'Scramble Suit II' to the rock hell of 'Red Study' via the krautrock rumbling 'Wing Run' to the slinky, sexy disco of 'Said The Shovel' this could easily be their most forward thinking / make every other band give up album yet. Thirty nine minutes is all you need. We love these boys. They rule.

Metamorphosed comes out of the sessions that produced 2019’s Face Stabber. It may only be five tracks long, but it achieves a full album’s length with the help of the more than 23-minute epic “I Got a Lot”. In an interview with Henry Rollins, Dwyer explained that this kind of song, “Usually… takes place at the end of the planned recording. We have extra time and tape to lay down some deep cuts and long jams, etc., the fun part, really.”

Somewhere amongst the 80 head-splitting, vibe-chasing, cosmically grimy minutes of the Oh Sees’ 20-somethingth album, one might begin to wonder if chief Oh See John Dwyer will ever run out of steam. More than two decades into the band’s career, they—Dwyer and his rotating cast—still manage to find new wheat to harvest from the fields of Classic American Freakouts, from bite-sized thrash (“Heartworm,” “Gholü”) to multi-part suites of drug-den soul (the 15-minute “Scutum & Scorpius,” the 21-minute “Henchlock”) tailored to weirdos of all hair lengths. Behold a vision in which punk and prog didn’t just coexist, but spawned. Fun? Menacingly. Evil? Studiously.

The newly shorn Oh Sees waste no time in racing headlong into nightmarish battle with the mighty ORC, and wouldn’t ya know it, they’ve clawed even farther up the ghastly peak last year’s A Weird Exits stormed so satisfyingly. The band is in tour-greased, anvil on a balance beam, gut-pleasingly heavy form, nimbly braining with equal dashes of abandon and menace on this fresh batch of bruisers and brooders, hypnotically stirred into to the cauldron of chaos you’ve come to expect from, ahem, Oh Sees. Fresh blood Paul Quattrone joins Dan Rincon to form a phalanx of interlocking double drums, alternately propelling and fleet footing shifting ground to pinion Dwyer’s cliff-face guitars to the boogie.