Thee Oh Sees: Castlemania

Label: In the Red

Wait a minute, something is wrong here. Garage bands are not supposed to evolve. They are supposed to release album after album of simple guitar chords, tight drumming and hooks, hooks, hooks. That's what John Dwyer's highly prolific Bay Area band Thee Oh Sees have been doing for most of their short but brilliantly fertile career. Now along comes their latest release—and I'm still absorbing the two-LP RSD comp from last month!—and we see the band trading in their vintage 60s garage rock for psych-tinged baroque pop. Oh, Thee Oh Sees still looks to the 60s for inspiration, but this is less Seeds and Leaves and more swinging London circa 1967, with arrangements evoking the Kinks, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and Magical Mystery Tour. I never dreamed I'd hear anything more than guitar, bass and drums in an Oh Sees song, but Castlemania features horns, bells, flutes and keyboards, even a drumless instrumental! The opener, "I Need a Seed," has what sounds like trumpets and trombones blissfully crashing with an acoustic guitar riff while Dwyer, assuming the role of dirt, pleads for botanical life. "Corpophragist (A Bath Perhaps)" rocks with a yeah-yeah-yeah chorus, church bells and bouncing electric piano bleeps, while "Stinking Cloud" features a Mellotron (yeah!), swirling flutes and bursting trumpets. I could rave about all 16 tracks on this pure-nirvana 42-minute album, but you get the point. Castlemania is an absolute gas, one of the band's best releases, showing a whole new side to their sound when we didn't even ask for one. Instantly one of my favorite records of 2011.