Down and Dirty With Thee Oh Sees
By Kim Bellware in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 16, 2010 9:30PM
Thee Oh Sees John Dwyer/www.myspace.com/ohsees
"Opening" would not quite describe how Wednesday night's show at Lincoln Hall began--"exploding" might fit better since the band hardly spared a second before they unleashed an avalanche of chugging surf and garage rock riffs intertwined with Dwyer's yelping vocals, a lively bass and shimmy-shake grooves. Everything about Thee Oh Sees' sound was big--even Brigid Dawson's tambourine rattled your ribcage as if the sound were coming from the inside out, like on "Enemy Destruct," which filled out the shouldda-been dance party with layers of squawk box echo and buzzy guitars that had an almost Led Zeppelin-like flavor.
Dwyer joked about the band using only three chords, which, as much as he meant it in jest, pretty well gets at the simplicity of Thee Oh Sees: there's not a lot of complexity, just a lot of power. The vocals pumped out my mostly Dwyer and Dawson are echo-y, modified and delivered mostly in the form of an exuberant whoop or yelp, when they're there at all. Lyrics aren't necessarily the propeller of Thee Oh Sees music, and they wander away from singing throughout their songs, choosing instead to fill space with dirty-groove breakdowns that expand and contract with frenetic pacing.
A few times the multiple effects (mostly for vocals) got the better of the band and instead of intentional reverb, the audience got slapped with some screeching feedback. The band adjusted quickly, and toward the end reeled in their focus to just one another on stage. The way the band watched one another's cues so closely, one would think they were trying to just play improvisationally.
Thee Oh Sees--or at least Dwyer--have enough material to fill out a whole set, yet after only 40 minutes (and when you're rocking that hard, those minutes go by fast) the band confessed they were out of music and headed off-stage. What followed was the always awkward gap where the audience cheers for an encore, but the band keeps them waiting too long. Eventually the applause died down, picking up just as the band reappeared for a disappointingly less intense encore. The whole ordeal wrapped up just shy of an hour, but it was hard to feel cheated knowing that Thee Oh Sees could have fit at least three more songs in had they not dragged their feet and wandered their way through the encore.
What the band delivered was a blast of pure fun and made a case for Thee Oh Sees as one of the most energetic and exciting live acts on tour right now, but the short set (which we've heard is not uncommon for the band) left us a little unsatisfied. Hopefully next time Thee Oh Sees will leave us wanting rather than leave us hanging.