Orc

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The Bay Area has always been something of a hotspot for musical counter-culture - the local scene in the late Sixties took in the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Flamin' Groovies and the Chocolate Watch Band inter alia, is still one of the most exciting - and all its heirs offer up a vast sonic palette, much less monolithic than is often thought... For two decades, Thee Oh Sees have sat at the top of the pyramid of these spiritual successors. These certified freaks had the idea of mixing together the epilepsy of the Cramps and the cartoon freshness of the B52s. These happy terrorists of San Francisco pursue their art with an appropriately lo-fi philosophy. Under the leadership of the charismatic John Dwyer, the garage group play concert after concert and turn out albums (numbering more than twenty already) before their competition has got out of bed. They go through names at a rate, too: Thee Oh Sees, but also The Oh Sees, OCS, Orinoka Crash Suite, Orange County Sound and today just Oh Sees! But what does the name on the bottle matter when you have drunk down the decibels and the guitars? And with that in mind, Orc, part-produced by Ty Segall, fulfils its task.  A sonic tsunami, killer riffs, fuzz pedals and larsens a-go-go, and that's not all: in general, bands like the Oh Sees tend to over-perform live and disappoint on disc. But here, we are forced to admit that Dwyer is more focussed than the average. Some sequences even drop the hardcore garage sound in favour of new horizons, like on the eight mind-blowing, psychedelic minutes of Keys to the Castle and its bewitching violin... A change of name which turns out to herald a real change of tune. © MD/Qobuz