Thee Oh Sees, Putrifiers II
Featured Album
Another collection of revelatory rock 'n' roll
Yep, it’s another Oh Sees album; but hey, at least John Dwyer waited nearly a year before chasing the one-two punch of Castlemania and Carrion Crawler/The Dream with another collection of revelatory rock ‘n’ roll. Recorded with a handful of helpers (including engineer/drummer Chris Woodhouse, vocalist Brigid Dawson and sax player/Ty Segall sideman Mikal Cronin), Putrifiers II is really Dwyer’s show, a series of well-aged demos that were flipped into a much fuller sound. So while “Wax Face” rips and roars like Thee Oh Sees’ infamous live shows, most of the music on here reaches well beyond the garage rock realm that’s familiar to any fan of the band’s longtime label In the Red. Take the death-march drums, vaporized viola lines and “Heroin” drip of “So Nice,” for instance; it wouldn’t sound out of place on a John Cale record. Elsewhere, “Lupine Dominus” is the closest Dwyer’s ever come to a Can song, “Wicked Park” flutters and floats like a lukewarm lava lamp, and “Goodnight Baby” is a lullaby that reveals the heart beneath Dwyer’s chest tattoos. Looks like one of the underground’s most prolific songwriters proved the law of diminished returns wrong yet again, and sure enough, we hear he’s already working on another record…
