Albums of the Year # 6 Oh Sees - Orc

Perhaps the most deranged but utterly enjoyable record of the year. The review comes from August:

If there's one band working today that fully deserves the drooling, jabbering prose of the many devotees of Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs and Julian Copes' writing in blogdom, it's surely Oh Sees, coming up to their twentieth anniversary if it hasn't already passed. Making Queens of the Stoneage on occasion look like lightweights, their latest album, smartly entitled Orc, (they know full well there are a large contingent of Dungeons & Dragon type obsessives in their audience), serves up exactly what their adherents want. Full on unhinged lunacy in the grand tradition of Sabbath, Hawkwind, Gong, Stooges, Savage Rose, Amon Duul II, and so on and so forth. I hope the list gives you the general idea.

Listening to the record today, I had a full on fixed grin glued to my face. The Oh Sees package gives you full license to believe that we're currently midway through 1970 and it's going to stay that way - forever. And that this state of play is entirely as it should be. In the same way as The Cramps did back in the day, this band provide a full alternative reality universe for you to utterly immerse yourself in. Hopefully. (in this case), in a home environment decked in lava lamps, bongs, incense burning and beads separating the kitchen from the living room.

As you'd expect, Orc never once lets in its provision of the 'full on' experience, even during its quieter lulls. There are plenty of others operating in a similar field. Ty Segall, White Fence, Night Beats, Meatbodies, Wand, The Black Angels blah, blah.. But frankly Oh Sees deserve consideration apart from these, fine as many of them are.

To sign off, the album really deserves some of the ragged rolling prose of the Meltzer / Bangs type I was talking about above but which I can't really churn out myself without feeling like a fraud. So here to provide that, a snippet from the Rough Trade Record Shops review. Hold on to you hat!

'The newly shorn Oh Sees waste no time in racing headlong into nightmarish battle with the mighty Orc and wouldn't ya know it, they've clawed even further up the ghastly peak last year's A Weird Exits stormed so satisfyingly.

The band is in tour-greased, anvil on a balance beam, gut-pleasingly heavy form, nimbly braining with equal dashes of abandon and menace on this fresh batch of bruisers and brooders, hypnotically stirred into the cauldron of chaos you've come to expect from, ahem Oh Sees. Fresh blood Paul Quattrone joins Dan Rincon to form a phalanx of interlocking double drums, alternately propelling and fleet footing, shifting ground to pinion Dwyer's cliff-face guitars to the boogie. Tim Hellman keeps it swinging like a battle-axe to the eyebrows. The tunes veer towards the violence of their live shows, with a few tasty swerves into other lanes.... heavy to lush, groovy to stately...throughout it remains sinister in its swaggering skulk, manic in fuzz-fried fugues... they hit all the sweet spots the heads foggily remember, and there's plenty to sweat over if you just hopped into the sauna, Ew. More evil... more complex ... more narcotic... more screech... more blare... more whisper... there's even more Brigid. Less 'Thee', but more of everything else.'

No frankly me neither! But listen to the record. In some ways it's the only way it can be properly described.

* A footnote to this. It's a very funny record and it's meant to be funny. One thing you don't pick up from the reviews of the album in either Pitchfork or Quietus.