Album Review: Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin

Thee Oh Sees are at their best when they're looking to incite a party. Throbbing bass lines, angular guitar riffs and astronomically high energy is their specialty, and within the first two minutes of Floating Coffin, their cards are laid out on the table. If you don't want to have a good time, go somewhere else.

There's nothing divergent from the garage-psych path that Thee Oh Sees have trodden in the past on this record, yet what we're given is the juxtaposition of some of their most polished work to date, oddly sounding like their most chaotic. The roughness in the guitar tones and the echoing distance purposely inserted in the harmonies all culminate in a sonic aesthetic that's comfortingly familiar but simultaneously exciting. I Come From The Mountain announces itself with jangly aplomb, but there are heavier, dragging riffs like in Toe Cutter – Thumb Buster that demand attention. John Dwyer's vocals remain in a teasing nasal falsetto, and when joined by Brigid Dawson's, as on Strawberries 1+2, it becomes bolder and more exciting. They know how to work their harmonies to make a chorus leap out on a song.

Thee Oh Sees understand the attention span of their listeners, and for every five-minute committal to extended guitar solos and choruses made for body slamming among sweaty strangers, there's the simplicity of a song like the title track, forthright but hypnotically complex, not unlike the album cover. Floating Coffin is waiting for you to dance, to shake alongside the jaunty guitar lines and to jump in time with Dwyer's yelps.