Get Delicious

Slime Time With Thee Oh Sees

Thee Oh Sees Warm Slime

Conceptually, The Oh Sees are more than the most deserving band to be played while you get ready for a date at a bowling alley.

God, that’s an awful first line. You should be ashamed for reading it. You should whip yourself with a wet noodle more than eighty thousand times if you thought about it in a “positive” way. In fact, we’ll go as far to say that we are so sick of writing about Thee Oh Sees that we’re tired. Not to eager to tell friends and “those inclined” about them much either. They Got Us! They Win! Warm Slime is another hot stinky chapter in the book of “How To Kill Rock and Roll”.

At a glance, Thee Oh Sees have way better album art than most. So good that if you saw any of the artwork out in public you’d look for the nearest garbage can a Muppet could be hiding in. If you accidentally eavesdropped on what someone had playing from inside their house, and what you heard was Thee Oh Sees then you probably wouldn’t be capable to explain to someone, at a later date, why it was, precisely, that you really liked what you heard. If you had heard it and then did try to explain to someone why it was great, you’d be overcome with genuine fear that the person whose time you had wasted would, then, be in their legal rights to knock-your-block-off! What you just read was nonsense. We’re sorry but we sad we were tired. Okay, all of that was just some weird way of saying that in an instant Thee Oh Sees can seem samey, similar and, without a doubt, a band you could hear at any spot in San Francisco. The reality is that you can’t judge a book by how it smells. You can’t buy it because of the sleeve. You’d be shot if you lingered on the first sentence and told your friends you’d read it.

In this case I m recalling a part of The Social Network, where the actor playing Mark Zuckerberg tries with all his feeble skills to look perplexed and happy about saying to another character, “We don’t know what it (the Facebook) is yet.” Warm Slime is NOT facebook. Warm Slime is NOT the Internet. Rest assured though that Warm Slime is still music, but maybe it’s a little more. We don’t really know. The sound of Warm Slime is kind of like the world’s newest way to make a sandwich. All the gristle and electricity it contains is all but mellowed out, or shellacked over with a groovy Rock and Roll mayonnaise. Its sound seems even more balanced even for Thee Oh Sees. Usually when you get a garage band breathing heavily it all becomes either one of three things: muddled; hair raisingly psychotic sounding; or just not enough of something. Warm Slime has found a way to do all of those three things in a such an enjoyable tone that you may be inclined to try a puff of a marijuana cigarette in front of a congressman immediately after finishing “Meat Step Lively”. Whence you take the fatal puff in front of the good congressman, you’ll have done it with the hopes he’ll join the fight to repeal Prop 8.

I apologize for this nonsense. We’ll be back at some point with something intelligent to say. We’ll also make it coherent. Anyhow, we’ll keep on trucking on this decaying tooth of trash.

Warm Slime’s an extraordinarily short album. It’s a one inch punch of psychedelic garage music in a beautiful container. Why make something that short and call it an album? Why are people still making albums at all? We have the iTunes store. You can get on mailing lists that, for a low rate, will get you a whole travelers dictionary of 7-inches bi monthly. Amazon.com has next day shipping, but also it’s own digital library and by the way, digital music files are getting more and more fidelitous by the year (that may not be true). But, the Internet allows people to supply the fans of their art with such immediacy that potentially there could some sort of new artistic dialogue that could emerge, we thinks. Is Warm Slime a step in that direction – who knows? Albums still have there place make no bones about it, but Warm Slime is, instead, maybe the mark of a real, legitimate, artistic band. The album is a lovenly exact piece of candy, it never gives you enough time to get bored, has a very groovy and warm opening track that gets you red hot with “man, bring it!”, and does what Thee Oh Sees do best – never gives you what you had expected, at least not exactly. It’s 2010’s I Just Had A Real Good Conversation album of the year!

Comment from Hiromi - February 25, 2011 at 8:02 pm

You encourage me to have a listen to ‘Warm Slime’! Thee oh Sees might not be so familiar to us here in Japan, I guess. But it must worth listening to it. And ‘Warm Slim’, being little more than SNS and making RR sandwiches, it should take me with it!