Get Delicious

You Should Spend: $66.75

*breakdown*-

Cool Death of the Island Raiders LP

Help LP+CD (you’re going to want to listen to it in your car)

The Master Bedroom is Worth Staying a Night In LP

Hounds of Foggy Notion LP/dvd combo

Sucks Blood

*add 13.25 for Coachwhips Hands on Controls*

**prices based on midheaven.com.  Other sources may vary**

one line: “…the band explicitly decides to sound haunted and on the edge of something hundreds of feet deep right behind you.”

To Sound Like Sound Should

Thee Ohsees are a band from San Francisco playing a mix of what has been called Psychedelic Garage Rock and something like acid trip punished neo-folk music.  Neo is a pretty pathetic word here for what it implies but Thee Ohsees sounds like seminal rock and roll found a hyperbolic time chamber to keep the dream alive. They’re pretty damn good at it too.  I am not a doctor and am neither a pharmacist (legally) but I wager that when it comes to the misnomer of Psychedelic Garage Rock, that is an apt description.  However I don’t know what the hell it means.  A friend asked me once what that genre is supposed to sound like and I just so happened to have two perfect answers.  First, I showed them a picture.  In this picture was a box of antiques piled on top of each other in a beaten up, old wooden box.  My friend was further confused when I added that this box of antiques was lying in the middle of the floor of another friend’s barn in Chatanooga, Tennessee.  I probably should have just spun them a few tracks from Help or The Master Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In, just to not leave them in the dark totally about what the hell a psychedelic garage rock band would sound like.  That would have been a little less psychedelic and bit more surgical though.  I have had five major surgeries involving broken bones and hernias.  All of them were hair-whitening. And that’s no fun.  Period.  We likes to have our fun when talking about music. The second answer was- this one stayed inside of my mouth for fear that it was really something to be thought and not just written down to be spoken later- that Thee Ohsees were like a body shop Salvador Dali would conceive of to sell antiques.  Antiques of which he would age with his mind, only.  How in the hell he would do that I don’t know.  How in the hell did he shape is wacky ass mustache like that I have an idea but I’ll never be sure.  Something like that would have to be accomplished by fingertips full of ear wax and a whole lot of insanity.  Anything out of proportion for something like that would throw the whole guy into chaos and abstract trash.  The same goes for Thee Ohsees overall sound-thing-aesthetic they have ripping their music up.

So lo-fi music has been around literally since, I’d have to say 1887 or so.  I mean mechanically reproduced music had been around for some 1000 years by that point but it was all live and technically not recorded in a low fidelity.  I gather even without listening to the first phonograph that it was as lo-fi as things could get save you listened to someone talk to you through a tin can.  So what I am saying is the quality was always on-the-basement-steps level until the 20’s by comparison.  However for the time it would have been cutting edge.  Before that it was the basement floor of lo-fi.  In fact I charge a band to record an album through a tin can just for credits sake.  With all these hippies and audiophiles I am surprised the spirit of competition isn’t more readily available.  If it is then I am out of the loop.  Who cares though.  Music through a tin can would sound something horrendous.  Well given the right circumstance it may not sound that bad.  Ok, that was joke but in all seriousness you have got this lo-fi aesthetic sewn throughout contemporary music these days.  It sounds fucking fantastic too.  It’s also the main medium through which Thee Ohsees stand way the hell out in.  Most recordings with some sonic fuzz, blurring the tones or having clipping volume peaks to it sound great.  It feels like a girl you had a crush on in high school, where she gained fourteen pounds rounding out her figure and you lost weight, tells you at some point during the reunion dinner a secret about her marriage.  Recordings like that give you something precious that you want to hold onto.  You want to hold onto it for the fact that no one you could tell the secret to would care as much as it meant to your ego, and your ego is a precious thing.  Don’t get me wrong, digital music has it’s own qualities I suppose. I am all for digital music.  It sounds alright.  However it’s much more difficult to trust on the merits of a musicians talent with the amount of possible (simple/easily quantifiable)manipulation involved.  Besides it’s obviously also a chance for bums my age to do something innovative and as evocative as recording in analog.  Regardless, digital is missing something but not of it’s own fault.  I am not going to go and try to compare the two types of recordings.  Analog and mono and stereo are old.  Digital, high def resolution and other “superior” technology is new and different.  Plus people have had plenty of time to experiment with tape recordings for a much longer time than digital recording has been with us which makes for gigantic gaps between the technique catalogues of the two (is there even something like a technique catalogue?  If there isn’t physically one, there should be!)  The issue of digital’s infancy worthwhile-ness isn’t really important.  Hell the kid of it is even less important- especially if that kid grows up to become a bona fide asshole- but the point is that people like Steve Albini or Chris Woodhouse, TOS’s main producer guy, use tape and use it with skills the likes of how Orson Wells or David Mamet use cinema.  It’s a sculpture of rusted out persona and a busted through series of timeless ideas and decades of sweat.  It’s an art form almost to the point of it being science.  Maybe.  Well, when an art form becomes dogmatic or atypically mathematic this means we may have reached the point of theory born of hypothesis.  The hypothesis is what the hell sounds the best?  But before we suppose any answers, hold your damn horse because frankly we don’t know how it all ends.  When I mean ‘it’ I mean the universe/us.  We know it will end but how and when is a different story.  I am only in my twenties so for God’s sake, let the end be later than sooner.  I have got a ton of stuff to do.

This is where I am going to give a micro explanation of analogue and the properties of it inside of the creation of music.

If you play guitar and add an analogue filter for the signal to go through from the guitar to the amp, what you will be left hearing is a soft laundry wire sound.  You’ll hear the pitch bend and flutter like a white shirt hung out to dry on a breezy day.  The air of the tone will howl in your ears and breathe like ten wolves crying for help inside a gigantic Tupperware container with the lid shut tight.  It’s designed to add a bit of flex and some bend.  It sounds like adding hot white chocolate to a whirlpool of hot dark chocolate.  It sounds all kinds of delicious and creamy.  Is it superior?  In it’s day it was definitely considered downright an abomination by most and rightly so.  It was a mistake.  Led Zeppelin had recorded Led Zeppelin IV out in East Hampshire with the Rolling Stones mobile studio.  After overdubbing the record they went to get it mastered in LA and low and behold the tape had caused this warble and delay effect that was “unsatisfactory”.  Despite this the album has sold a record 37 million copies.  That’s one hell of a satisfactory amount of records to be sold on an “unsatisfactory” final product.  That said I definitely don’t think that Led Zeppelin were artists in the thinking sense of the word.  They’re a bit as the British might say “in a state” when it came to concept, but hey, I have never sold 37 million copies of one album.  Regardless, if you don’t want it to sound like a pack of wolves is trapped behind blast walls of plastic than yeah, it sounds the pits.  But, in art people do a lot of crzy beautiful crap.  If you want to capture a recording like you’re holding a mic up to the Ghostbuster’s Containment Unit than analogue and lo-fi are things of necessity.

(To beat this dead dog some more, Roger Ebert has been caught up in debate about if videogames can be art and I think it bears association to this idea.  Music is art, thankfully.  There is no debate there.  An art form is some kind of refined idea that should point an appreciator in a certain direction and hold them in a moment amongst other things or something.  What’s important is the part with Ebert and Clive Barker talking about a thing (it’s in the 14th and 15th or so paragraphs) but if you want more background on the issue go here and here.)

Lo-fi and tape do a lot of things for music.  It puts the ghost and scratch into TOS but not much more than it is already there.  That may sound confusing.  If you decide to keep reading I promise it won’t be by the next three paragraphs.  They record this way because project-freak-beast of a frontman, John Dwyer (Hospitals, Pink and Brown, Coachwhips, YIKES!, Zeigenbok Kopf) , says that he feels that TheeOhsees sound more like what recording in tape picks up.  In response to being asked, ‘Why change back from 2-inch tape to smaller tape,’ he responded, ‘live we’re a lot more static-y,’.  Apparently quarter inch tape gives a recording with an edge that sounds like balling up an entire automobile or shredding tin foil using your own teeth.  They record live as well.  If you’re wondering why something like tape, which is inferior for it’s obvious “give”, could attach itself more to the medium of recoding TOS it’s because they usually play through their own mics and in particular their own monitors.  Again if you are confused suck it up.  They have their levels set just right.  What in the hell is just right?  Like mom has tucked you into bed on Christmas just right, or the first time you have intercourse with a female and the whole time your thinking that this strangulated sensation down “there” can’t be right!?  You look down at the other ten year old and tell them that this doesn’t feel like you thought it ought feel and you leave.  The idea is this: imagine a band in a basement with all players there sweating it out and destroying Rock and Roll.  This means that the drums, guitar, bass, keyboards are all what they call “Stage Volume”.  The vocals punching through there own PA into some monitors so they’re at stage volume as well.  It’s live and the levels of each individual are not mixed through one source.  It’s raw and it’s alive and it’s coming to kill you.  Again Thee Ohsees record live.  They record mixed at stage volume.  No time tracks.  No overdubs to strengthen the sound.  It’s a band entirely EQ-ed against itself to be recorded as that.  Whoa.  Before we take a bite of that delicious cake slice of an idea, all this work to record something in what most of the professional music world thinks is inferior, the band explicitly decides to sound haunted and on the edge of something hundreds of feet deep right behind you.  It’s almost paranormal in sound quality if you go ahead and believe in ghosts.  Tape is catching something that the human ear shouldn’t pick up or isn’t able to scientifically comprehend, which is to say it does something maybe digital can’t.

Throughout the history of recording a lot producers and studios started to capture and minimize certain ranges of amplitudes and wavelengths in studio recordings to get a more “appropriate” sound for frequencies the human ear was “capable” of absorbing.  So instead of a boom you get an “articulate real sounding” capture of the thud of a kick drum.  I can understand that to a very sharp and complete point.  If you’re not recording the real articulation of the sound in the human ear it’s of no consequence, forthwith the range to be optimized and made more available to the human ear.  I don’t need to explain that when people use the words warmth or room sound or how the empty or flat something is, people may be directly referencing the idea that in a vacuum certain frequencies are inaudible but not expendable.  Rather it’s a case for certain frequencies to be essential.  In context all those discardable nuances of an analogue recording may be able to take on something tangible and actually audible in a weird sense of the word.  Like something wobbling or slightly breathing.  Feeling that this corner of the room is colder than the rest.  A better example of this is like someone telling you to stand in front of a whole in the center of a six foot thick cement wall.  The hole is the size of a quarter and it is explained to you that there is raging fire on the other side.  If you stand there you will feel the warmth at the “real” and acceptable/capable level because you do realize, of course, that only a set number nerves synapses can fire at a given moment to give you the sensation of being warmed.  This way the warmth that you feel is actually what you know can “truly” be felt.  That is fucking kool-aid man!

I am not bashing science here but the kinds of it found inside of aesthetics is, most of the times, at odds.  The people that say, “Man, digital music is the future,” should probably just eat rat poison.  That’s an analogue way to hurt yourself right there.  They probably wouldn’t do it.

If you have ever watched Ghost Hunters or something of the like only babies and Polaroid film is said to reliably detect apparitions.  You can’t just take your HD handy-cam and film Slimer pop all the caps off your detergent bottles and break your eggs on the kitchen counter.  You need something extrasensory.  You need a medium (literally) to detect eerie energy or see orbs etc.  If you don’t think the ability of other analog capture to an example of the secret lo-fi and other recording methods hold then I cannot help you.  You might not like listening to TOS.  If you’re like me, let’s roll up into this spaced out, time rip music that is Thee Ohsees.

Not all Thee Ohsees’ albums are recorded in the same place or by the same people or in the same medium.  Tape sizes and machines vary.  Isn’t that great?  The possible combinations for what potentially TOS could sound like in a given place is comforting.  It’s seemingly endless in the scope of human experience.  If I weren’t afraid of being poor or looking like a complete psychopath I’d suggest following Thee Ohsees on tour or something. Wait.  Don’t do that.  I am pretty sure if you were to see TOS live for nights in a row your family could sue me for your heart exploding in your chest.  All that variation is really very hopeful for people like myself who want every record a band puts out to be fresh.  It’s created a weird dualism here as well.  Each place that TOS record in or play is somewhat personified more so than with most other bands because Thee Ohsees have distilled what they do in terms of the overall sonicism (really don’t want to type sound again).  Think about it.  If bands were to set everything they did to one mixed level based on the performance, that means the only thing that really happens is volume increase, you’d always be getting the band’s sound, just louder or softer.  What would change from performance to recording to performance?  The sound of the room would then become something which could attach itself to the band.  Whether they intended to extrapolate on the idea of using different spaces and tape mediums as a part of Thee Ohsees we’ll never know.  It’s happened though and I think that’s what’s really important.  Ok, so before anyone yells “What the hell is this!” there are two ways in which you can discuss music.  Performance outside of recording and the assembly of performances inside of recording.  Thee Ohsees supersede the majority of recorded music because they’ve distilled their sound and record performances collectively.  The recording variables can be played with in a very creative way as a result.  Imagine if let’s say Picasso or Monet painted everything just once.  No sketches.  No paintings.  No notes.  No concurrent themes.  Now imagine they used different brushes and different consistencies of paints to capture their ideas on canvas.  It would be a mess and the idea of style for either of these two would be non existent.  Despite this, most music is recorded this way.  Music in most cases conforms to the spaces it is played in.  That isn’t a bad idea, but it’s hardly helpful to define what it is we like about bands that we like.

An experiment you can do at home, given you have some of The Ohsees material, listen to “it’s Nearly Over” from Dog Poison and immediately after that listen to “Maria Stacks” from The Master Bedroom… and the space and medium personification I was talking about will be extremely apparent.  I am going to ruin the experiment.  Now, before “Maria Stacks” finishes how long will it take for you to say to yourself that those two songs are different?  Maybe forever.  Hopefully two seconds.  The best part is that you’ll never even think to ask if it’s the same band or not.  Quite frankly, if you were to line up all 21 of TOS’s albums, eps and lps, you’d get a Baskin Robins 31 flavors of rock music- all of which are set in the key of, “I am going to place something onto my tongue that isn’t exactly legal and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it, Dad!”.  I am going to go ahead, do the same thing and write the rest of this article celebrating! if you know what I mean.

Putting music out with the ferocity that Thee Ohsees have has been looked upon as at least questionable.  If your producing so much, how much of the music is sincere is a question people could find themselves asking.  I mean Mike Tyson fought and KO’d 28 fighters before he turned 20 years old.  If you didn’t know his professional career started at the age of 18 I am going to crunch these numbers real quick.  Numbers crunched! That’s 1.167 repeating people fought and knocked the fuck out every month for two years.  That’s damn impressive for two reasons: 1. I have only knocked out two people in my entire life (one of them was a mistake) and 2. That has to have been exhausting.  The Ohsees have 21 legitimate releases and they have been around for a decade or so.  Point being that that is a lot of releases.  Another thing is that all of the releases are vastly different sounding but still coalesce to a certain identifiably unique sound as in, if you hear an Ohsees song you can know when you’re hearing another Ohsees song within the first minute.  Really, this doesn’t matter because a boxer and a rock band are not the same thing essentially.  What Mike Tyson and TOS share though is simple.  You learn when you practice.  Your punches get faster.  The ability to evade punches ultimately speeds up. You’re constantly working.  Then, after all the work is said an done you try and kill the guy across from you.  The cycle continues and progress will continue to the point of drug abuse or old age.  Now what happens when you fight legitimately, and in TOS’s case, release material legitmately, is you define yourself.  You become more than the collection of your successes.  Mike has defined himself as a tireless madman cast in iron.   Thee Ohsees are the Mike Tyson of psychedelic lo-fi pedantry.  The amount of material is a feet but the quality of their sound is goddamn spooky.  They impress with each offering.  And each release is something different but tangentially similar, getting stronger and meaner and faster.  Eventually Thee Ohsees will rape your free time and the bad news is you will lose when you try and take them to court.

Thee Ohsees are really enjoyable.  They are creative.  You may be able to expect something from them after listening for a while but inevitably what they do will be different.  Lo-fi music is anything but scarce these days.  The sad part is that really a lot of mega fun music to listen to is scarce.  There’s a whole hell of a lot of decent music that will fill an evening or make you ask your friend ‘who is this?’ but really not a lot of memorable and definitive groups in the past decade.  I am only talking about the lo-fi genre and it’s pretty broad so cut a brother some slack.  You’ve got derivative genres and groups.  They’re decent as well.  Everyone is doing something nifty or “earthy” or deceptively non-complex but not any of it has made me stop listening to The Jesus Lizard.  Animal Collective hasn’t forced my hand to click them instead of Yura Yura Teikoku (ゆらゆら　帝国) on my itunes.  My dollar actually paid for Coachwhips and concert tickets instead of a Diplo or High Places CD.  This is all subjective of course but really, given all of the differences of all of our preferences you may be hard pressed to pick ten groups from the past eight years that were more preferable than like Tom Waits or Wu-Tang Clan or even David freakin’ Bowie.  I mean a group with many albums.  Not just one.  OK, also when I say preferable I mean that if you were pitted with a choice between two things like Beach House or Rage Against the Machine (Evil Empire) your choice would be easy.  Then you say, “Well it depends on the situation!  I may want to really hear Beach House or The Knife.”  And you’re right, it does depend on the situation sometimes.  But where in the fuck is the Rage Against the Machine of the last three years?  The last five years?  Who in the hell is going to give me a Thriller album plus a damn fine few years of amazing music? before you cut your nose off?  I am telling you Thee Ohsees are it.  It’s sick how good the band makes music sound.  The way they record is one thing.  The variation from album to album while maintaining this drugged up gauze headed mood throughout is kind of unbelievable.  The amount of bizarrely familiar melody or tripped out early Rock and Roll or even Scottish folk you’ll hear while listening to them is like cutting your hair and doing a really god job at it.  It’ll also give you your nuts or pussy back and make rock and roll fun again without making it a complete fucking joke.  It’s  vulnerable in the early recordings and with the latest Warm Slime it’s criminal with the amount of groovy tunage that’ll make you shake your ass and toss an empty beer bottle at a stop sign.  Man, Thee Ohsees just forced me to write tunage.  What the hell?!?!  That may not be the last time that happens but I am going to keep a leash on it.  I promise.

Before I Go, It’s Cake Time!

Without trying sound like a complete jerkoff, the guitarist for one of the bands I am in has about twenty or so pedals of which he uses to accrue his tone.  Only around two of those pedals are used for manipulation to grab a hold of an alternative texture inside of a particular song.  All the rest are used in attaining the sound he has in his head.  If I had to go through and add up all the minutes spent during one practice with him saying ‘ the tone sounds like cheese’ or ‘what the heck happened man, this amp is just completely blown’ or (my favorite) ‘I need to have just good tone…in order to just, care.’, I would need to say the amount of time out loud and then simultaneously snap a Polaroid of me saying them into a mirror in order for it to seem real.  What the sound is that he is going for I don’t know.  I’ll never know and I don’t have to.  Sometimes the tone is great.  Other times it’s different.  Inside of one practice session he may change amps looking for this sacred and private tone so me coming closer to knowing what kind of sound it is exactly that he is thinking of just gets further and further away.  Plus we don’t always practice in the same studios in Tokyo.  Despite this you’d think that having these mechanical things to increase the regularity of the sound would help with just that- regularity.  Most of the devices are analog.  If you were paying attention to the wobble of lo-fi I was talking about earlier this is your cue to go, “ok”.  Analog makes things a bit irregular.  These pedals- however frustrating- become a band member or an instrument.  They are not mere additives.  It’s not something to be lost to the idea pf peripherals.  They are intricate.  Much in the same is the idea of using tape to record Thee Ohsees.  John Dwyer has extrapolated the idea of effects pedals into two other mediums: amplification/monitor levels and recording.  That’s friggin’ psychedelic right there.  TOS alone have three other magnificent attributes in the shape of Mike Shoun’s drumming, Petey Dammit’s ryhthm, and Brigit Dawsons hydroponic vocal harmonies beside the ingenious way TOS are exhibited.  But what makes them the most important garage band out there as well as a genuine standout is due to their presentation.  No other groups beat it up and roar like Thee Ohsees, be it Ty Segall or The Clap or Sic Alps.  Before you “see the rules of getdeliciousDOTnet” I am not comparing here.  It deceptively seems like I am but rest assured I am not. I am not comparing because all the bands I just mentioned are not a RIYLs but instead they are all of them other important groups inside of this particular genre, as of right now.

One More Thing On Album Art

Who gives a good goddamn about album art!  If you want to really hate on something, the next time your friend asks you what you think about this band being good or how that record sounds just reply with, “Man, the album art for that is sooooooo hott!”  Say that first.  If you say it last I guess that’s ok.  I am done being facetious.  TOS’s album art is some of the most fun out there.  Plus it’s all designed by John Dwyer apparently.

See the video here: Meat Step Lively

Zak McCune currently lives in Tokyo but may move at any given time.  While in Tokyo he plays in Large Prime Numbers.  Friend his band on myspace and watch him play drums on Youtube.