Thee Oh Sees – Castlemania
May 10th, 2011
In The Red
Score: 8.3
I almost feel bad for waiting so long to review an album this good, but then again when I saw John Dwyer’s Thee Oh Sees last month, they neglected to play a single song from Castlemania, so perhaps he’s not in any hurry in promoting it either. The truth is, Thee Oh Sees have been remarkably consistent, each of their releases a must-listen for fans of meticulously disordered garage-punk.
But this latest project is a step forward. Castlemania manages to maintain a pervasive setting throughout, an environment that isn’t so much a theme as a series of colors and images. It’s a joyride in a personified jalopy straight out of a screwball cartoon through a tainted technicolor landscape home to a bouncing sun with a grin so eager it’s unnerving and overgrown deranged animals that can’t quite manage to be comforting. It’s a trip, but it’s brilliant.
Dwyer’s unearthing of sounds native to an almost forgotten era of psych-rock is uncanny, and some of them I don’t quite have a name for, even though I’ve heard whatever that melodic popping thing on ‘Cophrophagist’ a million times in fuzzy records from the 60s. And he’s still mostly barking, punctuating his lines with that yip, but I don’t think he has ever strung this many fun hooks together, all the while proving that the lyrics themselves barely matter. The chorus from ‘Corrupted Coffin’, for example, reads “You’re dead, dead, dead like I’ve already said”, and he basically just plays with his voice on ‘Spider Cider’, but it still manages to stick. It’s borderline silly shit, which really emphasizes that cartoony feeling, but when there are lines like ”It don’t feel too good to be dead in the 21st century” which open the album, and the tender ‘I Won’t Hurt You’ led by keyboardist Brigid Dawson, it proves their real conflict, that Dwyer and company don’t actually live in an alternate reality.
In fact, the closing trio of ‘I Won’t Hurt You’, ‘If I Stay Too Long’ and ‘What Are Craving’ throw some serious weight around after the frivolity of the first 13 tracks. It’s an appropriate denouement, again proving that Castlemania has an almost flawlessly calculated arc despite the goofiness, kind of like that obnoxious sun setting, or those mangy animals heading into the hills.
Paul Bulow