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Thee Oh Sees Get Experimental

Thee Oh Sees 'Warm Slime' walks the line between hokey and bad ass.

Thee Oh Sees

Warm Slime

Released on May 11, 2010

Warm Slime is not what I’d choose for myself off Best Buy’s shelf or in the iTunes Store, but that’s not saying much, since I don’t buy a lot of music anyhow. Neither am I a big fan of Thee Oh Sees and I don’t really know anything about the band at all. Nor am I up on the latest punk slash rock bands coming out of California (or New York, or anywhere, for that matter). Which puts me in kind of an awkward position qua reviewer. (I’ve omitted a rather digressive parenthetical aside about why an Intro-level understanding of Econ can be useful for really appreciating the evaluative quagmire I find myself in w/r/t Warm Slime, the main point of which is the idea that consumers more or less sponsor musicians by exchanging money for music.)

But so here I am, already admittedly not what you’d call a very well-schooled consumer of music, attempting to recommend something I know nothing about. Which I suppose is a good place to start: Thee Oh Sees is a San Francisco-based band, whose sound Wikipedia categorizes as “United States experimental,” and also as each of the following: Alt-rock, Garage rock, Avant-garde rock, Punk rock, Post-punk, and Art punk. I don’t know whether this helps you decide whether you’ll like Warm Slime. I suspect it might, but then I wonder why you’d even read a review to tell you something you probably already knew. Because if you’re into these punk/rock scenes, you’ve heard of Thee Oh Sees and their every release.

So maybe the best I can do is to say “if you like X, Y, and Z, you’ll probably like Thee Oh Sees and Warm Slime,” where X, Y, and Z are albums by artists with similar sounds but, as mentioned supra, this isn’t my scene and I don’t know well enough to replace the variables with any meaningfully similar bands. (Except let me try, and in so doing prove my point: Thee Oh Sees sound like the something Larry Sportello would like, or would be on the airwaves with Rat Fink behind the wheel of a mean-looking Kandy-Kolored hot rod, or maybe like a secular O.C. Supertones with fewer instruments and more attitude if anyone remembered them.)

A more useful review will evaluate Warm Slime on its own terms, preventing my personal biases from themselves preventing me from writing about Warm Slime on its own terms (except that I’ve already written my way pretty well around the album, but better late than never I guess). This is difficult, because the question of preferences –what I like and why I like it (and how I know I like what I like for the reasons I do)– still applies, and is pretty much contingent on the question of whether I’d spend money to support a group whose music I find enjoyable.

And but so the greater challenge would seem to require I disregard the question of preferences and hear the album for it wants to be, how it succeeds and when it fails, and to try to leave open some room for your own personal tastes to maneuver in and agree with or dispute what I’ve said. The only way I can imagine doing this is to consider Warm Slime on a song by song basis, without either a wholesale endorsement or indictment of the album altogether.

That said, “Everything Went Black” is kind of obnoxiously militant, and there’s way too much reverb and distortion throughout (which I guess is part of the “Noise” of noise rock), but tracks like “Castiatic Tackle” and “Mega-feast” are wicked fast and totally badass, and sound more like surf punk and kitsch rock than anything “Garage” or “Avant-garde.” And I actually caught myself slapping thigh in time with “I Was Denied,” in a way that wasn’t hokey or, if it was, didn’t feel like it. Each track of Warm Slime bleeds into the next, but those aforementioned stand out over the less stellar rest.

So. Check out Thee Oh Sees on iTunes and purchase a couple-few tracks (the review of Warm Slime does the band a disservice by insinuating they ingest only second-rate hallucinogens, but you can’t really trust Apple anyway because they could give a shit less whether the music it sells is any good, as long as it’s sold) instead of the entire album.

Posted by Diego Baez on May 27, 2010 @ 8:00 am