Album DescriptionAvailable in:
"Orc" is the nineteenth studio album by American garage rock band Oh Sees, released on August 25, 2017, on Castle Face Records. It is the band's first studio album to be released under the name Oh Sees, after it was announced that they would be dropping Thee from their name.
Co-produced by John Dwyer, Eric Bauer, Ty Segall and Enrique Tena, it the band's first album to feature drummer Paul Quattrone, and is the first album in nine years to not feature recording engineer and regular collaborator Chris Woodhouse.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 79, based on 18 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
User Album Review
With Orc, the band consolidate the strengths of their joint 2016 releases, A Weird Exits and An Odd Entrances, streamlining their grab-bag experimentation into a more fluid flow and quasi-conceptual framework (well, at least as much as we can assume its fantastical references to castles, warriors, and beasts are somehow connected). Here, the shred-ready opener “The Static God” isn’t just another case of Oh Sees doing their motorik-maniac act, but rather a last-blast rocket ride to parts unknown, its stratosphere-breaching velocity eventually cooled by a cloud-parting organ drone that hints at the more patiently paced music to come.
Orc also blows open some intriguing new paths forward: “Cooling Tower” recasts Can’s “Mushroom” as some bizarre-world children’s TV show theme, its doomy groove brightened by sundazed Stereolab-style hums, while “Paranoise” is a jittery Afrobeat jam further destabilized by buzzing synth frequencies and Dwyer’s spookily hiccupped vocals. And with the closing instrumental “Raw Optics,” Oh Sees prove that aforementioned Afro-funk excursion is no random one-off experiment, but a reliable rhythmic foundation that can fuse seamlessly with their signature garage-psych sound. By the time Orc winds down with the most chilled dueling drum solo ever, Oh Sees’ random name change starts to make more sense—as this band continues to travel further toward rock’s outer limits, definite articles just seem like unnecessary baggage.
Reviewed by Stuart Berman for pitchfork.com.
External Album Reviews
None...
User Comments
