OSEES

OSEES

OSEES

(Los Angeles, USA // Deathgod Records / Castle Face Records / In The Red Records)

Led by the hyperactive John Dwyer, Osees is probably one of the most prolific rock band of its generation. More than 20 studio albums, a solid reputation on stage, THE reference in terms of garage rock music. Dwyer is also one of the founder of the Californian record label : Castle Face Records. The story goes that the origin of the label name comes from a nickname of a friend of Dwyer, petrified by a joint too powerful and whose mouth was gaping, such as the door of a drawbridge.

John Dwyer settled down in San Francisco in his twenties. There, he created several bands as Pink & Brown, The Hospitals and after that, the famous Coachwhips : an aggressive and raw punk band. The band projects kept changing since its creation in 1997. First a freak folk solo project, it drifted gradually to a garage sound with the constitution of a proper rock band (Brigid Dawson, Petey Dammit and Mike Shoun) around 2007. Acclaimed for their impressive punchy performances, Thee Oh Sees played and toured until 2013 before their first break. Around 2014, John Dwyer makes experimentations with his new project Damaged Bug : an interesting mixture of electronic and noise music.

Regarding Thee Oh Sees, the band reappears with new musicians on stage, including two drummers simultaneously. Since, Dan Rincon and Ryan Moutinho pound their instruments, play almost identical to the same shots, rolling close, which adds power. What a surge of energy ! This new rhythmic settings became quickly their hallmark. New formation includes Timothy Hellman on the bass, the two drummers and John Dwyer as a frontman.

After Mutilator Defeated At Last, the band took a new turn, more Krautrock. Nothing surprising when you know Dwyer is a huge fan of German Krautrock bands such as Can, Neu! or La Düsseldorf. In 2016, two albums have been released : A Weird Exits and An Odd Entrances. One year later, Ryan Moutinho leaves the band to be replaced by Paul Quattrone (!!!, Warm Drag).

Under the new name « Oh Sees », the Californian band launched Orc (2017) a powerful garage- rock release. Meanwhile, John Dwyer and Brigid Dawson worked again together as OCS for the album Memory of a Cut off Head.

Prog- and metal-influenced Smote Reverser is out in August of 2018, an efficient record with a scary cover. Slight modification on stage with the addition of keyboardist Tomas Dolas from Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel.

The band kept up a steady rate of live shows throughout the next year, and Castle Face reissued two of the group’s early lo-fi releases (The Cool Death of the Island Raiders and Graveblockers). They also found time to record Face Stabber, an expansively trippy album that added more electronic and free jazz elements to their already full sound that was issued in August 2019.

After releases by Dwyer’s Damaged Bug project and free jazz band Bent Arcana — both of which had appearances by Oh Sees bandmates –Osees (note the slight alteration of the name) returned in late 2020 with Protean Threat, a more aggressive, punk-influenced album that boiled their prog and jazz leanings into smaller portions.

Just in case anyone accused Dwyer of slacking, he rounded out the year by releasing Panther Rotate, an album made from drastic remixes of songs from Protean Threat, electronic excursions, field recordings, and a sideways cover of a song by Alice Cooper’s early garage band the Spiders.

 

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TY SEGALL & FREEDOM BAND

TY SEGALL & FREEDOM BAND

Ty Segall & Freedom Band

(Laguna Beach, USA // Drag City Records)

One of the leaders of the new psych-influenced garage rock scene that erupted in California in the late 2000s, Ty Segall has produced a catalog as prolific as it is diverse. Working as a solo act and in a number of side projects, Segall has released literally dozens of albums since he left the Epsilons and cut his first project on his own in 2008. Depending on the album, Segall can sound raw (2016’s Emotional Mugger) or refined (2013’s Sleeper), and he’s capable of focused one-man- band efforts (2009’s Lemons) as well as sprawling and eclectic releases with a range of collaborators (2018’s Freedom’s Goblin). But Segall’s simple but strong melodic frameworks, his creative restlessness, and the infectious intensity of his instrumental work on guitar and keys are the constants in his ever-evolving body of work.

Ty Segall first garnered public acclaim as the lead singer of Orange County, California garage rock revivalists the Epsilons. With that band, he practiced a rawer, snottier take on Strokes/Vines/White Stripes-style rock, occasionally delving into more retro territory. When that band splintered, he struck out on his own and started cranking out lo-fi albums, beginning with a self-titled effort on Castle Face in 2008. On his solo album Lemons, however, Segall delivered a much more traditional sound, studiously re-creating ’60s guitar tones and drenching his tracks in old-school reverb. The stomping results bore a striking resemblance to early garage masters such as the Sonics and the Standells, as well as proto-punks the Stooges and bedroom folk antecedent Alexander « Skip » Spence. He returned in 2010 with Melted.

The year 2011 was busy for him, with two albums — Live in Aisle Five and Goodbye Bread — scheduled for release, as well as an EP of T. Rex covers, Ty-Rex. Goodbye Bread marked a turn toward Segall’s softer side, evoking a John Lennon-like take on quieter and more introspective singer/songwriter fare. In 2012, Segall collaborated with Strange Boys’ offshoot White

Fence on Hair. This mini-album married Segall’s Beatles-soaked pop hooks and production with White Fence’s Syd Barrett-influenced, acid-damaged garage sounds. Two more Segall albums followed that year, including June’s Slaughterhouse with the Ty Segall Band on In the Red, and Twins, the completely solo follow-up to Goodbye Bread released on Drag City in October.

Segall’s profile grew, and 2013 began with several reissues of previous projects, including a 2009 collaboration with Mikal Cronin entitled Reverse Shark Tank, as well as his earlier garage trio the Traditional Fools’ out of print 2008 debut. In 2013, Segall also released the debut album from his side project Fuzz, in which he played drums rather than guitar. Also in 2013, he showed off a new approach, recording a departure from the usual and titling it Sleeper — all of the songs were acoustic ballads. Not one to rest on his laurels, Segall returned to the studio to record the 17- track follow-up Manipulator in 2014, released by Drag City in August. A live concert by the Ty Segall Band at the San Francisco club the Rickshaw Stop was released in February 2015 as part of the Live in San Francisco album series from Castle Face. Another live recording of Segall and his band, preserving his set at the 2013 Pickathon Festival, was released in May 2015 as a split album with the garage/psych act King Tuff, who were also taped at the same event. The year 2015 also saw the arrival of the second Fuzz album, and an expanded reissue of the Ty-Rex EP.

Segall kept up his usual frantic pace the next year, releasing the Emotional Mugger album in January, then touring behind it extensively. He also formed the band Gøggs, with Fuzz’s Charles Moothart and Chris Shaw of Ex-Cult. They released a self-titled album in July. The next Ty Segall album was a self-titled effort in early 2017 on Drag City, recorded at Steve Albini’s studio and featuring a full band that included longtime collaborator Mikal Cronin and the Cairo

Gang’s Emmett Kelly on guitar and vocals. Well received, the album reached number ten on Billboard’s Top Independent Albums chart. In early 2018, the prolific Segall brought out Freedom’s Goblin, a 19-song album that reunited him with Albini, Cronin, and Kelly, while expanding his sound with the use of a horn section, then released Joy a few months later — a collaboration with old running mate White Fence on a batch of off-kilter psych rock songs. In October 2018, Segall dropped Fudge Sandwich, in which he put his own unique spin on 11 cover

tunes, interpreting artists ranging from Funkadelic to the Grateful Dead. The same month, he also brought out a low-key cassette-only release, Orange Rainbow, created in a run of just 55 copies for sale at a show of his visual art at a Los Angeles gallery. In January 2018, two live shows in Los Angeles on the tour supporting Freedom’s Goblin were recorded by Steve Albini. Highlights from the concerts were released in March 2019 on the album Deforming Lobes, credited to Ty Segall & Freedom Band. After indulgoing his rock side on most of his 2018 releases, Segall took a detour with First Taste, released in August 2019, which was more clearly informed by vintage pop and folk-rock sounds.

While stuck at home in 2020, he took the opportunity to record an EP of Harry Nilsson songs, which was released in March under the title Segall Smeagol. He also spent time recording with his usual band of cohorts (Cronin, Kelly, Moothart, and keyboardist Ben Boye), working separately for the most part. Denée Segall of Lamps also joined the session, writing and singing on two songs. The resulting Harmonizer was co-produced by Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas and is the first album done at Segall’s recently constructed Harmonizer Studios. The record is the cleanest, most synth-heavy entry in his catalog and was released by Drag City in August 2021.

 

 

 

FUZZ

FUZZ

FUZZ

(Los Angeles, USA // In The Red Records)

Fuzz is Ty Segall (drums/vocals), Charlie Moothart (guitar/vocals), and Chad Ubovich (bass).

They are heavy-rock lifers and three California-bred dudes who have been refining their riffs and getting weird together since high school which wasn’t that long ago, actually).

Fuzz was formed in/around 2011 as a collaboration between Segall and Moothart, but its only within the last year that the pair had sufficient time to guide the band out of side-project limbo and into a recording studio. Since then, they have released two singles, « This Time I Got a Reason » (Trouble In Mind) and « Sleigh Ride » (In the Red). Around the time of the second single, Cosio joined on bass.

They are not dabblers or dilettantes. Fuzz have flipped through used bins, hard drives, and record collections of the world, seeking out the finest weirdo cuts. The bandís self-titled debut LP, which was recorded by Chris Woodhouse (Thee Oh Sees, The Intelligence), dives deep, drawing inspiration from the more esoteric reaches of heavy metal pre-history. There are Sabbath and Hendrix nods, obviously, but on « Sleigh Bells » you might also catch a whiff of UK progressive blues business like The Groundhogs, particularly when the song quits its 10/4-time intro and reboots into full bore choogle. Maybe youíll even glimpse the ghost of Australian guitar-legend/sharpie guru Lobby Lloyde sniffing around « Raise. »

The mood is not light. The songs project a state of perpetual paranoia and eroding mental health.
And as it should be, you know? It’s a record for the burners.

Over the next few years, the members stayed busy with other pursuits — Ty with numerous solo albums, Moothart with his band Meatbodies — and when they got back together to make more music it was with new bassist Chad Ubovich, also of Meatbodies. The trio recorded 2020’s III with Steve Albini, whose legendary skills as an engineer captured the sound of the band playing live with minimal overdubs. The result is their heaviest, most Black Sabbath-sounding record to date. It was issued in October by In the Red Recordings.

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FRANKIE AND THE WITCH FINGERS

FRANKIE AND THE WITCH FINGERS

FRANKIE and The WITCH FINGERS

(Los Angeles, USA /// Greenway Records)

“There’s long been a growl festering in the West, an earthen rumble fed by tectonic tension, acrid smoke, and sun-parched air. The brew has boiled over lately, a pressure-cooked chaos that can no longer be contained. The growl has grown to a howl.. the howl is at the door. Few are as ready to meet the madness head on as Frankie and the Witch Fingers. On their new album, Data Doom, the band hurtles the listener head first into the wood-chipper of technological dystopia, systemic rot, creeping fascism, the military-industrial profit mill, and a near-constant erosion of humanity that peels away the soul bit by bit. With a fuse lit by these modern-day monstrosities the band seeks to find salvation through a thousand watt wake-up of rock n’ roll exfoliation.

 

After tearing through the tender heart of the Midwest, Frankie and the Witch Fingers found themselves clamped down on the fried edges of Los Angeles, carving out a niche that’s equal parts molten tar pit teardown and cataclysmic careen. Following releases on Hypnotic Bridge, Let’s Pretend, and Permanent, the band landed between the twin barbs of Greenway and The Reverberation Appreciation Society, a perfect fit for their frenetic blend of rhythmic whiplash and sonic soul shake. Anchored by songwriters Dylan Sizemore and Josh Menashe, the band has kept a rotating door of friends and collaborators moving through their midst over the past few years, coalescing post-pandemic into a symbiotic stage beast that’s become the beating heart of their new album, Data Doom. Bassist Nikki “Pickle” Smith and drummer Nick Aguilar have been road-hardened and readied over the last year, laying the groundwork for the new record’s 300 pounds of pummel and propulsion.

 

That heft was hurtled onto tape in the band’s Vernon, CA studio space. The locale let the city’s grit creep into the crevices of their new record, a wild swing at the sternum that hits the listener like an adrenaline shot to the heart. Wiping away the haze of stoned-ape psychedelics that permeated their opus Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters… the band favors an asphalt assault of rock, riff, and amphetamine rhythm. As they’ve wound out of the last phase, their sound, over a series of singles, has begun to thicken and throb. It’s coalesced into a darker strain that ingests the explosive impulses of gas-crisis-era proto-punk, the rhythmic insistence of 70’s German Progressives, and the elasticity of funk fusionists alike. They’ve welded their arsenal of influences to a chassis of nail-bitten bombast that drives Data Doom into the midst of the maelstrom.

 

The band has shared bills with Kikagaku Moyo, Ty Segall, Oh Sees, Cheap Trick, and ZZ Top, churning their stage-side scorch into household recognition — burning through a barrage of multicolored vinyl pressings and sparring with indie heavyweights for Billboard chart positions. Data Doom looks to cement that status, a sinewy slab cut on the stone of social collapse and licking the blade in anticipation of what’s to come. “Never name the darkness itself,“ intones Sizemore, but the darkness is already here, embedded in every moment, inextricable from the capital, sabbatical, sustenance, and solace of the modern age. Data Doom is the elixir and the exorcism, it’s the reformation rendered in rock ’n roll.”

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MUDHONEY

MUDHONEY

Mudhoney

(Seattle, USA // Sub Pop / Third Man Records)

The world is filling up with trash. Humanity remains addicted to pollution despite the planet getting hotter by the minute. People are downing horse dewormer because some goober on television told them it cured COVID. Tom Herman of pioneering avant garage band Pere Ubu still doesn’t have his own Wikipedia article. The apocalypse, it seems, is stupider than anyone could’ve predicted.

Fortunately, the absurdities of modern life have always been prime subject matter for Seattle-based band Mudhoney. The foursome take aim at all of them with barbed humor and muck-encrusted riffs on Plastic Eternity, their 11th studio album.

Mudhoney (vocalist Mark Arm, guitarist Steve Turner, bassist Guy Maddison, and drummer Dan Peters) remain the ur underground group, their gnarly primordial punk stew and Arm’s sharply funny lyrics as potent a combination as they’ve been since the band’s formation in the late 1980s. From taking on climate change from the perspective of the climate if the climate tried to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix (“Cry Me An Atmospheric River”) to a driving rock and roll song about taking drugs meant for livestock (“Here Comes the Flood”) to a classic punk attack on treating humans like livestock (“Human Stock Capital”), Plastic Eternity is a heady run through all the proto-genres of guitar rock with a keen eye on the inanities of the world in the 2020’s.

The recording of Plastic Eternity delivered several firsts for the band. With Maddison planning on moving his family to Australia, Mudhoney was forced to work on a deadline, booking nine days at Crackle & Pop! in Seattle with longtime producer Johnny Sangster. Since the pandemic had made it impossible for them to convene in their practice space for nearly a year and a half, this meant they were going in to make a record with an assortment of half-forgotten riffs and nascent ideas rather than fully-fledged, well-rehearsed songs.

This was unusual for a band used to writing songs by “standing in a room and looking at each other and playing,” says Arm. “We had the time and space to think about things as we were doing them, and to make a kind of course correction—to use a fucking terrible cliche.” They built “Flush the Fascists” around a looping synth line, broke out a harmonizer on two tracks, added a vocoder to “Plasticity,” and even created a protest song out of a spontaneous jam on “Move Under,” the chorus of which Arm calls “something the Runaways might have come up with if they were us.”  “Undermine the foundations/ Of the lies that they repeat,” implores Arm on the chorus. “You gotta move under/ Until it all comes down.”

Plastic Eternity also marks the first time Mudhoney has given writing credit to anyone outside the band, thanks to Sangster, whom Arm calls “a brilliant musician and way more adept at musical theory than any of us,” stepping in at times to offer advice on where the songs could go.

Also unusual for Mudhoney: Plastic Eternity contains two genuine love songs. The first is for the aforementioned Tom Herman, one Arm’s favorite guitarists and the protagonist of “Tom Herman’s Hermits.” Then there’s closing track “Little Dogs,” an paean to the simple joys of hanging out with tiny canines, and one in particular: Arm’s Pomeranian, Russell, whom he couldn’t bear to give up after fostering him, sure that any other owner wouldn’t allow the little fellow to “let his freak flag fly.” No irony here—just gratitude to a little pal in dark times.

So it seems, despite its mordant delivery and crusty exterior, Plastic Eternity is not just a rebuke to the constant attacks on our intelligence and our planet—it’s an ode to the connections we make with other living beings. What is the persistence of Mudhoney but a testament to that? When asked why they continue making records nearly four decades after forming, Arm’s answer is simple.

“We like each other and we like being in a band together,” says Arm. “Some people have poker night or whatever the fuck, and they have the excuse to get together with their friends. For us, this [band] is that. This is what we do.”

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