Osees are impossible to pin down, again.
Basically, you should start every Osees album as if you’ve never heard any of the previous ones.
This can save a lot of time: Intercepted Message is the twenty-sixth John Dwyer’s band have made in its multiple different names and formats since 1997, a productivity which emulates that of The Fall and for him the minstrel role of its similarly fin-de-siecle gang master Mark E. Smith.
Adopting this goldfish-like approach means the only stat that’s important here is that it’s the successor to A Foul Form, an outing on which Dwyer and co. paid homage to anarcho-punk bands like Crass and Rudimentary Peni from which suitable – and familiar – abrasive chaos ensued.
As with that outing, the sometimes difficult frontman has provided liner notes of sorts, writing: “A pop record for tired time…At long last, Verse / chorus…Early grade garage pop meets proto-synth punk suicide-repellant.”
This quality of prose may leave you considering that there’s no need to follow-up with the rest of this review, but whilst Intercepted Message is probably all those things and more, the job of providing additional explanations is ours, and as ever the trip is an eventful, disjointed and idiosyncratic one.
The most obvious booby trap is Dwyer’s use of the word ‘pop’, a phrase open to a mountain of interpretation and which in his world can mean practically anything. Take for instance the opener Stunner, on which his familiar bark and swinging arm guitar chop is pitched against proggy synths that wheedle away in psych-pomp glory.
The band seem pretty much at home in this oddly shined flower-punk environment, especially on the crunching new wave of Unusual & Cruel, a track on which musically they fall somewhere between a pair of Lips – Black and Flaming – and refuse to accept the olive branch of normality.
Normal is another relative thing of course. Other than the odd chink of what might count for orthodox (Goon), for the rest of this occasionally serene, sometimes manic, always wrong-footing work expectations based on past experience might as well be balloons.
The title-track leads the charge, a knuckle headed chant-along peppered by roughneck brass on which Dwyer intones, ‘Your king’s a c**t/He keeps you down, whoever could he mean?, presumably a deliberate act of throwing some raw meat at some press corps(e) or another somewhere.
In no way showing signs of halting there, the anodyne funk of Die Laughing and its fx-soaked backdrop offer the passkey to a dancefloor it’s probably best to steer clear from, before The Fish Needs A Bike, with its madness-contaminated no-wave loops, temporarily sees the train departing for all stations towards the Avant Garde.
Like a noise boomerang, eventually things sort of right themselves on Submerged Building, in execution a minor renaissance for melody that has the feel of a hyperactive child of Talking Heads without the tension of David Byrne’s ultra dry voice.
At this point all things are possible, and the job of blasting open the doors of perception has been completed. This is marked ‘done’ with the closing pair of tracks; Always At Night a synth ballad that runs to over seven minutes through which Dwyer croons (you read that correctly) before the smudged Tropicalia of Ladwp Hold closes out a sequence which is harder to sum up in words than it is to hear.
Does Intercepted Message sound anything like what Osees have done before? It’s better not to care, otherwise the flood of history will kill its outlandish concept – just enjoy the madness, then wait for the next chapter.
We probably won’t be able to describe that, either.
