22 TAKES:

A Sentiment to Thee Oh Sees. By Rauol Nilsson

Salut! Terroreyes readership,

No frills today. Here’s the score. Thee Oh Sees’ “Carrion Crawler/The Dream” record is out in November. It is destined to be your favorite Thee Oh Sees record since “HELP” or since “The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth A Night In” or fuck it, you love it all and it’s the best since “Castlemania”. No matter your personal preference, “Carrion Crawler/The Dream” is one of their finest long players yet.

Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer announced it in April. Buried at the bottom of a press release was a quote that read, “maybe our best yet.” I clung to it or rather it clung to me… like the promise of a cross country visit from a former girlfriend – guaranteed satisfaction, kiddos.

Those rooting for John Dwyer since the 90’s, it is high time we grow up rather than allow the industry fascists hell bent on turning cold shoulders towards Thee Oh Sees to get us downer than down. It is futile to ask why Thee Oh Sees are not champions of the indie world. First, stop expecting the teenage angst merchants posing as rock-journos to ever care. They are well beyond the dollar paid from a Sailor Jerry ad. Foreign cars are lining the pockets, Mountain Dew is shrinking their dicks and Heineken is numbing their judgment with swill pilsners. Could you ever see Thee Oh Sees hocking pedestrian extreme-o sodas or tight-assed German beer? Do you ever? The rock journos demand salesmanship in exchange for glowing reviews that results in headlining the summer festival circuit. Some call it, trade. Not payola. It’s cleaner, since we banned a good business practice.

It’s painful to see the glory of San Francisco go to Girls, but here’s a band that knows what the inside of a Fiat looks like. Girls are cut from the stuff that got Brett Easton Ellis famous; the turmoil of a privileged white teenager story framed in religious oppression and drug addiction, but damn it, the kid writes’em pretty don’t he. If not Girls, then the Disneyification of garage rock archetypes sent sputtering into cartoon slackerdom will keep Thee Oh Sees down. We get the Wavves brat who never learns, even when he wigs out in front of thousands from a bad acid trip. They say, Fabricate a redemption story, since he’s young and dumb enough to fuck himself over into more headlines. Give him a girlfriend who’s super bummed about dumb shit and make their lives like a Nick & Nora film come to life. Oh, and give him Jay Reatard’s old band for street cred.

How could we possibly sell Thee Oh Sees? Artistic merit? That’s a dozy of a chore. What if we attempt to explain that visceral gnarl that crawls in our skin? Subjective. But, you know what I mean right? It just makes you want to wiggle and twitch and make bug-eyed faces in the mirror with your tongue wagging. Sweet Jesus, what are you on? Clean at the moment, but listening to Thee Oh Sees, I could handle a tab or just some heady burn. Christopher Owens takes pills. Xanax. It’s far more fashionable. It should make him happy, but it doesn’t – so poetic, right? Errr sure, but I wouldn’t twitch and spazz if… There’s only one legal product that behavior brings to mind: Four Loko. That stuff is one dead teenager away from being banned nationally. We can’t risk it. Well, true. Still don’t see why way-gone garage rock can’t be enough. Stop looking for strung out chemical reactions… sedate to Album already.

My fellow journos, I get it. What’s the angle to play with Thee Oh Sees? We, as the documentarians of rock grit could not possibly write: Well, there’s this guy who may or may not do a shit ton of acid, but we are pretty sure he did at some point. He’s too weirdo to not have taken a lion’s share of it. He had other bands, good ones that we never cared for, and now he’s got this one, which is probably his best and most accessible of his career. He’s respected by people who like In The Red records and collect the Nuggets compilations – meh. The thing is, he’s old and no one wants to see that. If there’s one thing I learned as a T.A. for my creative writing professor it’s to first ask, “Where’s the story?” Yeah, this lacks legs… 7.2.

There’s little hope for rock n’ roll journalism with robber barons having their way with the indie publications. Gone is the rock critic waking up in a shoe box apartment, vomiting last night’s excess onto a Rolling Stone magazine and taking to the stationary to write from the gut. That breed offed itself or lost the will to fight with rock going big business. In their place is the odious smell of trend hunting; obedient hounds tracking for the approval of a fat sack on a dark horse. Even your old boy Nilsson is boohooing about a paper cut he got earlier tonight opening a white wine bottle – whitefuckinwine.

You’re fucking your whole shit up by reading. It’s the antithesis to rock n’ roll righteousness. I wish it were different. But the fulfillment of hunger and thirst is obtained purely through music alone. Criticism is dead. It is better to consider bands like Thee Oh Sees untamable in language. No matter the writer’s command, it reads like hack bullshit compared to the noxious venom of a session with the record or a wigging out at a venue.

I once wrote a feature piece for a college rag about The Lost Sounds, a Jay Reatard band. On the phone He seized my young mind with a story, in which he took a glass globe in a coffee shop and broke it over his head while shouting “Fuck the world.” There was nothing dangerous about rock ‘n’ roll in ’04 and Jay Reatard held degenerate grit above his head like Atlas and smashed it over his skull. It roused me out of a funk that had me assuming danger was dead forever. But there was no rock writer aristocracy to document his mayhem. No pestering idolizer to write odes to his mania. There was only me, with my utter lack of influence and command – wasting a good story. Currently, Jay Reatard is dead forever, while the yappy lapdog journos want to commend Wavves for tweeting about dropping acid at an MTV Awards ceremony. Were the reports about Wavves, acid or rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle? Naw, just an old fashioned back-handed plug for the SoCal brat scoring a show called “I Just Want My Pants Back” on MTV.

There is no uproar against the market value darlings, only mindless altruism towards hope for bands with grit and merit to join those ranks. Those with a bit of sense are limited to memes and tweets with no raw gnarl and piss for the establishment – just quips. It is a young ruse like presidential voting among 18-year old liberals. Boy, do you ever want your man to seize the throne, but it’s not your world. Worse yet, if you continue behaving like a suckfish to the weird and stoned idolatry, well, your day will never be. You’ll retire to green pastures of trimming weed plants for your buddy until the G-men raid the farm and seize your assets. You’ll have the rights of a migrant worker and barely speak the proper English for them to treat you like much else.

Did I lose my thesis? Shit.

The fat, the rub, the gnarl of this editorial is tough to stomach. “Carrion Crawler/The Dream” won’t get Thee Oh Sees on the cover of Rolling Stone or the cover of Fader or the cover of CMJ or a full album stream on NPR or a stream on Spin or crack Billboard or get the Best New Music Stamp on Pitchfork or get them mentioned on MTV Hive. But Thee Oh Sees have another gut-slicing record under their belt to take on the road like between tour soldiers who only feel comfortable amidst war zones. We mustn’t trouble ourselves with bothersome questions like why the journos with the power insist on giving bands on their debut record all the glory owed to the city of San Francisco. We must know what we’re afraid to know, which is that bands like Girls and Wavves are marketable. John Dwyer deep throating SM57 mics, croaking warped uhhuhhuhhs is not and it is better that way as long as we refuse to read the rock critics.

It’s a frustrating mess, but I remain,
Sincerely on your side,
Rauol Nilsson