John Dwyer and Thee Oh Sees aren’t drastically different than any other ensemble mining the vaguely popular genre. The band’s issued a torrent of singles, albums and splits over the last few years with shocking consistency. Its Warm Slime, issued through In the Red, maintains Thee Oh Sees streak. There’s not a downer in the clutch of 7 songs, but there’s also nothing to be shocked by – even the track that’s intended to be surprising.
In 1967 Sky Saxon and the Seeds issued a disc called Future. The closing track was a seven minute harp-centered effort called “Fallin’.” Purposefully weird, the track was basically a re-working of “Pushin’ Too Hard” – it was still good. Saxon and company figured out a manner in which to capture the garage beat and include an unexpected influence. And while it might be a bit far fetched to figure the group was listening to Alice Coltrane or Dorothy Ashby, the orchestrated psych stuff coming out of the UK could have played a part in all of this.
Regardless of where that notion came from for Saxon and the Seeds, there have been a bevy of garage tracks that push towards the ten minute mark. It’s still a relatively rare thing, especially in the current crop of Bay Area groups seemingly concerned with concise grooves able to fit onto a seven inch. But how else would one go about amassing such a collectable back catalog? It’d be impossible – just odd to think that collectability, at this point, factors into small press labels conception of business.
So, the title track opening Warm Slime might be out of step with most of what’s going on. Because of the song’s construction as a unique approach to the genre, Thee Oh Sees continue to function within its self constructed confines – that means we all expect the group to be weird, so being weird is what the band does. Remember Help including a track called "Meat Step Lively" which closes in a kraut styled flute jam? Yeah, that was weird too, but intensely satisfying.
Catching the band at Schuba’s last fall, the ensemble even saw fit to end its set with that ten plus minute "Warm Slime" - assisted by the Fresh and Onlys' drummer on supplemental percussion. Watching the quartet, augmented by a fifth player should have resulted in a stellar performance, but the song just rolled along at a boring pitch. It’s hard to figure if the band amidst the throwns of an off night or not, but it doesn’t matter too much. Rather boring in a live setting, the song somehow works on record. Even if it didn’t, the following six tracks would have done the job just the same.