Osees are short, sharp and right to the point on their latest studio album.
‘Bad times make for strong music is something I agree with,’ says the Osees frontman John Dwyer in introducing A Foul Form, their 24th album and one on which they embrace the fiercely DIY aesthetics of British anarcho-punk and new-birthing West Coast hardcore from the early 80’s.
22 minutes long from the opening feedback squall of Funeral Solution (which begins with Dwyer screeching, ‘What the fuck is going on/Human life is not that long’) to an exhilarating 60-second cover of Rudimentary Peni’s Sacrifice, the best description of it all is the singer’s own: ‘Brain stem cracking scum-punk, recorded tersely in the basement of my home.’
Given the band’s canon evolves with every release – having pulled on Nuggets-style garage, frazzled psychedelic rock and even taken in ambient electronica – a new temporary stop on the journey should hardly be a surprise, but what makes A Foul Form so life-affirming is its utter contempt for an overground the band have occasionally seemed destined for.
It’s hard to say whether this is accidental or not, but tracks like Too Late For Suicide – a needling, Crass-like judder which in feeling resembles lo-fi dentistry – and Social Butt, which does a similar hit up job on Future Of The Left – give full reign to the album’s vision as a salute to the inspirational.
‘Weirdos and art freaks that piqued our interests and pointed us on the trail head to here/now’. Bleak but vital, this is a representation of what that lost generation of outsiders did in making art with a prime objective of dismantling any kind of status quo.
Roots aside it celebrates the vital notion that with so little music made in our super-refined world now is designed to be shocking (other than what’s manufactured for that purpose and therefore isn’t) hearing a band playing stuff because they can with barely a fuck for the consequences is so evil and exciting.
This kind of seedy glee is in the elastic-limbed Fucking Kill Me and also the title-track’s mendacious, rabid thrash, but there are so many enemies of everything out there it would be a crime not to remind them that they’re one day going to be in the crosshairs of people’s anger.
These adversaries also like to pretend they’re on our side, so Frock Block skewers the moral hypocrisy of the church whilst Perm Act squares off against police malpractice (sample: ‘Fair laws, pretty fair laws, meant to hold the line/Heavy on the masses, oppression by design’) as a tool of brutally supporting the status quo.
Why this though, why now? Addressing that, the legendary Henry Rollins just shrugs and says, ‘What motivated the band to turn loose this hyper-concentrated slightly less than 22-minute burst of meteor density somewhat punkazoidal music? that’s at best a mediocre inquiry.’
A Foul Form is then a warm beer on a hot day, stepping in dog turds, shaking hands with a snake. It’s nakedly ridiculous, irascible, difficult, funny (yes, the ha-ha variety) and brilliant.
If bad times make for good music, then things must be really, really bad.
