On their terms, on their time
San Francisco band Thee Oh Sees don't have a plan, they just play what they want, when they want - and they want to play a lot, writes Charlie Carter
Thee Oh Sees are a tangle of contradictions. While the scuzz-rockers are at the vanguard of San Francisco's psychedelic revival, they are old enough to remember the city's first era of peace and love. Although they harness the recording and promotional potential of new technology, they have led the way in reviving the defunct flexi disc. And as their peers lazily stick to the album-tour-rest formula, Thee Oh Sees instead record whenever the urge takes them and fill the gaps in their schedule with gigs.
"When you're in a band, you don't have a plan - it should be a natural process and not like you have a manager telling you what to do," says Brigid Dawson, keyboardist and, along with founder John Dwyer, one-half of Thee Oh Sees' frontline.
It's this take-it-as-it-comes attitude that sets apart Thee Oh Sees and their Fog City peers from the latest crop of American alternative bands, for whom the in-vogue insult "landfill indie" could be comfortably applied.
As their east coast counterparts - and particularly the near-identical band-by-numbers groups from Brooklyn - are busy trying to recreate the squeaky sounds from the wrong bits of the 1980s (think A-Ha, The Cars, Cyndi Lauper and so on) on bedroom synths, Thee Oh Sees have carved out their own niche of garage rock with more than a pinch of 1960s psychedelia.
We are very much of the mindset that if we think something will go well in our music, we will probably use it
Within their distorted guitars and eerie keyboard drones, you'll hear touches of Iggy Pop's proto-punks The Stooges, hints of druggy drone gods the Velvet Underground, a nod to the west coast's '80s punks and more than a suggestion of rough-and-ready proto-punk of 1960s bands such as Paul Revere and the Raiders, and ? and the Mysterians.
