Thee Oh Sees’ new album is called Mutilator Defeated at Last. It’s out on Castle Face Records and it’s a beautiful beast. It also marks the welcome return of a longtime member, keyboardist/vocalist Brigid Dawson. She’d sat the last couple of albums out after the frontman and only permanent member, John Dwyer, moved to L.A. from San Francisco.
A handful of tracks on Mutilator Defeated are among the band’s heaviest shredders, but they’re also less blunt, more fluid than many of the hard hitters on Help (2009) or Floating Coffin (2013). The first three tracks, “Web,” “Withered Hand,” and “Poor Queen,” along with middle track “Lupine Ossuary,” stand out as the most distinctly Oh Sees thanks to their swaggering grooves and fuzzed out guitars. “Withered Hand” in particular sinks its hooks deep, blazing through a deafening and grungy guitar line broken up by brief solos that are at turns dreamy and twisted.
The album’s most gargantuan track is the near seven-minute slow burner “Sticky Hulks,” which moves back and forth between a retro-sounding electric organ and delayed guitar, eventually climaxing in an epic but brief solo before flaming out into a carefree night. On the mellower side of things, there’s the all-instrumental “Holy Smoke,” which features a rare acoustic guitar but no lack of momentum, and then the hushed falsetto and clean reverb of album closer “Palace Doctor.”
Mutilator Defeated is as compositionally dynamic as Drop (2014) and Floating Coffin, but it also captures the psychotropic haze and nocturnal warmth of earlier albums—like Help and even the band’s pre-California, mostly-solo recordings—an atmosphere that had thinned on recent records, which turned to a more high-octane, more manic direction. What makes this album great is how it brings these qualities together into something as heavy as a neutron star but also smooth and graceful. Thee Oh Sees have always been a band to draw on different styles and influences, yet Dwyer’s unique take on it all—his sense of atmosphere and ability to translate different musical concepts into a uniform aesthetic, his characteristic vocals and dark but funny lyrics—has always been their bloody and beating heart. Mutilator Defeated at Last continues with this trend, and hopefully there’s a lot more yet to come.
