Album Review: Osees SORCS 80

Twenty eight albums in, under a slew of different names – Orinoka Crash Suite, OCS, The Ohsees, Thee Oh Sees, Oh Sees and most recently OSEES – band leader and primary songwriter, John Dwyer, continues to explore fresh sonic territory.

So, what to do, when you’ve done it all before – folk, garage rock, psychedelia, krautrock, space rock and more?

Well, you simply demo everything on a cassette four-track using drum loops, create a range of three octaves of that sample, then load them into Roland SPD-SX samplers, and learn the transcribed songs using drumsticks. All while thinking about a quartet performing them live, essentially playing percussion, with no guitar or drums. Add a skeletal brass section of tenor and baritone saxophones and you have SORCS 80, a decidedly innovative new OSEES record.

‘Look At The Sky’ launches the album on a sci-fi wave of techno-punk, while ‘Neo-Clone’ closes it on a swell of krautrock-infused tribal beats, washed with an English pastoral neo-psychedelia. In between, you have everything from the futuristic soul of ‘Pixielated’ and the space-rock of ‘Drug City’, to the hardcore rage of ‘Cochon d’Argent’ and ‘Cassius, Brutus & Judas’.  Elsewhere, there’s an incredibly addictive dose of martial breakbeat on ‘Also The Gorilla’, which demands repeated listening.

Out now

RATING 8/10

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