Osees

A raw, noisy, over-the-top rock & roll explosion, Osees is one of the many incarnations of John Dwyer's long-running garage-punk project. Rooted in his ripsaw guitar sound, shouted vocals, and aggressive performance style, Osees is a newer, more streamlined handle for Dwyer's group, Thee Oh Sees (or just Oh Sees), their moniker(s) since 2006. Fractured psychedelic pop, confident garage rock revivalism, crushing proto-metal, dark psychedelia, and trippy prog are some of the ingredients that give their music its form and flavor. 2015's Mutilator Defeated at Last was the album where the Oh Sees' many ingredients most effectively came together before they reinvented themselves as Osees with 2020's Protean Threat, an effort that took their diverse musical obsessions and packed them into faster, louder, and (relatively) shorter sounds. As the decade progressed, the band began to integrate synthesizers into their sound more and more, on 2023's Intercepted Message edging into vintage synth pop territory, while 2024's SORCS 80 subtracted guitars from their approach entirely without sacrificing any of the band's innate punkness.

After Rhode Island native John Dwyer relocated to California in the late '90s, he became active on the San Francisco indie scene, playing with several bands including the Coachwhips, Pink & Brown, Yikes, Up Its Alive, and Swords & Sandals. Dwyer formed OCS (which was an acronym for Orinoka Crash Suite, Orange County Sound, or whatever Dwyer decided it was on any given day) as a vehicle for the experimental instrumentals he was producing in his home studio. In time, OCS morphed into an actual band, and worked under the usual flurry of names, most notably as the Oh Sees or the Ohsees, and eventually as Thee Oh Sees. The group featured Dwyer on guitar and vocals, Brigid Dawson on vocals and tambourine (later adding keyboards to her arsenal), Petey Dammit on bass, and Mike Shoun on drums.

Sounding a bit like the Mamas & the Papas and Love run through a blender with bent and rusty blades, the band signed with the German Tomlab label and released Sucks Blood in 2007 and The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In in 2008. Thee Oh Sees' moved over to In the Red for their third album, 2009's Help, which featured a splash of garage rock power mixed with the band's psych-pop sound. Warm Slime followed in 2010. Thee Oh Sees pulled double duty the following year, offering the pop-leaning Castlemania in June, followed in November by the heavier, wilder Carrion Crawler/The Dream, which was also the group's first recording with second drummer Lars Finberg of the like-minded group the Intelligence. Never a band to rest when they could be making noise, Thee Oh Sees returned in September 2012 with Putrifiers II, an album combining Castlemania's fractured pop sensibilities and Carrion Crawler/The Dream's ferocious rock experimentation. Their next foray, 2013's Floating Coffin, saw the group stripping away all the weirdness and hitting hard with a heavy set of straight-ahead garage/punk rock tunes.

With Dawson moving to Santa Cruz and Dwyer decamping to L.A. later that year, it looked like the band would soon split, especially after Dwyer told the crowd at a show in December 2013, "This will be the last Oh Sees show for a long while, so dig in." The hiatus was temporary, though, and there was a new album, Drop, released in early 2014. It was made solely by Dwyer and longtime producer Chris Woodhouse in an old banana-ripening warehouse and featured a more arranged, strangely poppy sound. With a new lineup that featured drummer Nick Murray and bassist Timothy Hellman, Thee Oh Sees returned to the stage for a series of shows and recorded their 14th album, Mutilator Defeated at Last. It came out in May 2015 and featured former member Dawson on backing vocals.

Soon after the album's release, Murray left the band and was replaced by two drummers, Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon, for a subsequent tour. A live album was recorded during a stop in San Francisco and issued in June 2016 as part of Castle Face's Live in San Francisco series. Following hot on the heels of the live album was the group's 15th LP, A Weird Exits, which arrived in August. It featured contributions from the live band and a cover by Hair Police's Robert Beatty, who is known for his hallucinatory, airbrushed artwork. Before the year was out, the band released another single, "Fortress," and an album, An Odd Entrances, made up of songs recorded at the same sessions as A Weird Exits.

The group were oddly silent for the first half of 2017; when they returned it was with an abbreviated name, Oh Sees, and a new drummer, Paul Quattrone, to replace the departed Moutinho. The first recorded output by the new lineup was Orc, which was released in August and featured contributions from Brigid Dawson. A couple months later, Dwyer and Dawson revived the OCS name for Memory of a Cut Off Head, an album of quietly hazy acid folk songs. The band took another long break (for them) from releasing albums, but when they did come back it was with the expansive, prog- and metal-influenced Smote Reverser. It was released by Castle Face in August 2018 and featured the same basic lineup as Orc, 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 their 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, which was issued in August 2019. After releases by Dwyer's Damaged Bug project and free jazz band Bent Arcana -- both of which featured appearances by Oh Sees bandmates -- he unveiled his group's new name, Osees, as they returned in September 2020 with Protean Threat, a more aggressive, punk-influenced album that boiled their prog and jazz leanings into smaller portions. Just a month later, the group showed off two sides of their musical personality with the album Metamorphosed, which opened with three punk ravers each lasting under two minutes, and closed with a pair of extended prog-psych jams, clocking in at 14 and 23 minutes. 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.

Always one up for collaborating, Dwyer and a wide range of musicians spent much of 2021 recording and issuing albums by a variety of projects that delved into garage jazz (Witch Egg), chaotic improvisation (Endless Garbage), guitar-heavy skronk (Moon Drenched), and noise jazz (Gong Splat.) After this trip into previously uncharted territory, Osees came roaring back with a palette-cleansing set in 2022; A Foul Form is a set of fast, loud, and off-kilter punk tunes that included a cover from British anarcho-punks Rudimentary Peni. At the end of the year, Dwyer opened Discount Mirrors Studio in Los Angeles with Eric Bauer. The embarked on another busy year that saw him release the all-percussion album Posh Swat, a new age/synthesizer music-influenced record Ritual/Habit/Ceremony -- which included collabs with Kyp Malone, Azita, and YoshimiO -- and an Osees album. Intercepted Message showed the influence of vintage synth pop along with the band's fiery take on punk. The band's next album took guitars out of the equation, as Dwyer constructed the songs using drum loops, which were then fed into samplers and played with drumsticks. Also added to the arrangements were drums and a horn section, the result being that at times SORCS 80 came across like Dexys Midnight Runners playing side by side with the Units. The record was released in August 2024 on Castle Face, after which the band embarked on a tour of the U.K. and North America. ~ Tim Sendra & Mark Deming, Rovi