Thee Oh Sees
A Weird Exits
Castle Face
You know that dark red color you see behind your eyes when you close them? And how those colors begin to form shapes and day-dreams, and inspiring a feeling of falling, or flying? There’s an impossible physical sensation of movement, of wind painting your skin, and the rushing sound of waves in your ears. Impossible, because you’re sitting in a chair in your home. You’re lying in bed, safely buried beneath a blanket. You’re on the subway, a hundred feet underground. It’s a cosmic trip of the mind, further proof that our senses and our brains are capable of so much more than what we demand of them.
With A Weird Exits, Thee Oh Sees have tapped into that deep chasm of possibility in our minds. Instrumental tracks like the hypnotic time travel rave of “Jammed Entrance” and the polyester groove train swagger of “Unwrap the Fiend Pt. 2” yank headmaster John Dwyer out of the garage and rocket him into a land far, far away. In space they may not be able to hear you scream, but apparently the sounds of fuzz and distortion and the double attack of duel drums can still radio through.
In the strange new world where this record resides, “Gelatinous Cube” bridges the gulf between there and Earth. Dizzying with guitar acrobatics and playfully sinister in tone, here’s the track that finds the band planting a flag on another planet and daring the natives to challenge them.
Sailing the album into the three sun sunsets of this alien world, “The Axis” is an eerie church organ trip played at the wrong speed, with slow and low vocals and a desert guitar that breaks the sound barrier when it desperately reaches its thirsty crescendo.
A Weird Exits rips a hole in the fabric of time and space and leads the mind on all sorts of strange journeys in a way that only strange music can.
