Thee Oh Sees - A Weird Exits album review

John Dwyer’s Californian quartet Thee Oh Sees deliver in spacey spades.

Thee Oh Sees - A Weird Exits album art

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So prolific they make Ty Segall look like a layabout, Thee Oh Sees have averaged over an album a year since they began in earnest in 2003, without taking into account various EPs, live offerings and standalone singles. Driven by the restless energy of singer/guitarist John Dwyer, the band are garage-rock at the core, but with a foraging sense of curiosity that leads to fascinating detours into prog, psychedelia and electronica. This successor to last year’s Mutilator Defeated At Last arrives in the direct wake of Live In San Francisco, a doughty double album and DVD that captures Thee Oh Sees at a furious tilt.

One of its tracks, Gelatinous Cube, makes its studio debut on A Weird Exits, a record of such sustained intensity that it nearly knocks the wind out of you. It also marks the first studio appearance of drumming duo Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon, who help shape immense beauties like Plastic Plant and Dead Man’s Gun, both of which rush along with monstrous purpose, marked by Dwyer’s punishing riffs. But this band are so much more than sheer noise, be it fashioning spacey meditations on lysergic epic Crawl Out From The Fall Out or delighting in processional prog-psych on Jammed Entrance.

Rob Hughes

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2008, and sister title Prog since its inception in 2009. Regular contributor to Uncut magazine for over 20 years. Other clients include Word magazine, Record Collector, The Guardian, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and When Saturday Comes. Alongside Marc Riley, co-presenter of long-running A-Z Of David Bowie podcast. Also appears twice a week on Riley’s BBC6 radio show, rifling through old copies of the NME and Melody Maker in the Parallel Universe slot. Designed Aston Villa’s kit during a previous life as a sportswear designer. Geezer Butler told him he loved the all-black away strip.