With a band as prolific as Thee Oh Sees, every new release can seem cumbersome. Since 2003, the band has released nearly 25 albums and gone through several different name changes: OCS, The Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, and now Osees. In all that time, the one constant behind the group has been John Dwyer, the enigmatic guitarist who is still as energetic and cutting edge as he’s ever been.
The group’s last major release, the strong but bloated double album Face Stabber, came last year, and with it capped a particularly fruitful period for the band, then known as simply as Oh Sees. Under that moniker, Oh Sees started releasing their albums with over-the-top metal covers – the kind the feature monsters and goblins – and letting their sound shift into a more expansive, proggy kind of excess. That period has since been hailed as a kind of renaissance, with some of the highest critical acclaims of their career and rivaling the support of their best albums almost a decade ago. Now with Protean Threat, the band has attempted to compress that sound into something a bit more digestible, and hope to continue their string of success.
This album is a success, albeit one that does little to distance itself from the releases that came before it. Each track shares the percussive and wonky tone of Face Stabber but Dwyer knowingly infuses enough melody into the highlights to make for a few key standouts. “Upbeat Ritual” and “Red Study” perfectly meld Dwyer’s pop formula to his more eclectic output and help define the tone of the entire album. That tone is idiosyncratic but finds time for a few upbeat cuts interspersed within, that seem likely to make up the bulk of his future set lists. “Said The Shovel” and “Caophyr ‘74” are surprisingly fun and esoteric trips in themselves outside of the strangeness that makes up the rest of the album. But even without those respites, Dwyer’s newest album is another welcome addition to his vast catalog and prove that when the Osees release another album next month, it’ll likely be just as strong as Protean Threat.
