Thee Ohsees' Castlemania

Who is better at Cramps'-style, monster-haunted garage rock than the Ohsees' John Dwyer? No one, that's who.

A review of the new one, up today at Dusted.

Thee Oh Sees
Castlemania
In the Red

The art for Castlemania shows a scarred, green goblin hand grasping a Playskool toy telephone, sharpened monster fingernails closing on an earpiece meant for toddler babble. In a way, it’s the album’s aesthetic in a nutshell, an antic, super-simplified sense of play juxtaposed with death and decay in a cartoon version of the danse macabre. Ohsees mainstay John Patrick Dwyer jitters St. Vitus style though manic 1960s pop landscapes, his grin either the pure pleasure of garage rock abandon or the way lips pull back from a rotting skull – or maybe both.

More

"I Need Seed"

Help! My list goes to eleven

My best of list is getting awfully crowded these days, with slots still to find for the new Sonic Youth, Bats and Clean records. I’d also like to shoehorn Thee Ohsees record in there somewhere, might have to take ten to the second power to get all this music I love on the list. Anyway, my Ohsees review ran yesterday at Blurt, and I observed, “No record can capture Dwyer’s frantic charm and energy, a stage presence that is both surreally over-the-top and regular-guy approachable. Still, #Help# comes pretty damned close. If this is not the best garage rock record of the year, it’ll only be because Jay Reatard pulls a career high later on in 2009. I hope it happens, but I’m not counting on it.”

The whole damn review

About that Woodsist Party I referenced


Here they are, not at this year’s SXSW, at the Cake Shop last year