OSEES
Support: the psychic graveyard
Today, Osees. are regarded as one of the essential figures on the American garage scene, and the psychedelic brutality of their music is undeniable. On stage, frontman John Dwyer's unique vocal signature blends with explosive drums and furious electric guitars to deliver a raw, energetic brand of made-in-California garage rock.
Led by guitarist and multi-instrumentalist John Dwyer, the band has made super-productivity its spearhead. Indeed, for just over ten years now, the Oh Sees have been endlessly renewing their compositions. It took John Dwyer a full year to decide on a successor to Smote Reverser. While Smote Reverser was a kind of musical chimera, drawing inspiration from jazz, prog, space rock, garage and even metal, their last album, Face Stabber, takes experimentation even further. With an unwavering determination to break away from any label that might have been attached to them, Dwyer and his collaborators prefer to venture into the more fantastical terrain of jazz fusion and heavy prog, while continuing to distil the psychedelic garage that only they can.
Support: The Psychic Graveyard
With a manic output of four full-length albums—Loud As Laughter, A Bluebird Vacation, Veins Feel Strange., and now the brilliant Wilting–in nearly as many years, Psychic Graveyard makes consistently thrilling and unsettled sonic artifacts for a world emptied out and flattened by a joyless and sociopathic mediascape. But some things do stay consistent across their ruptured anti-aesthetic: Charles Ovett’s relentless workflow on the drums; the burbling sawtooth substructures, grimy lead synths, and deconstructed guitars supplied by Nathan Joyner and Paul Vieira; and, of course, vocalist Eric Paul’s many narrators and personas, who find form as ghosts howling from within the machine or as agitated surrealists living lives huddled in the grimmest of redoubts. On the new LP Wilting, once again a product of geographic dispersion (Providence and San Diego), the band invites the listener to peel back the pedigrees and fall headlong into their twitchy waking dream.
