Album Review: Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin

Five seconds into I Come From The Mountain, the opening track of Thee Oh Sees' latest album, Floating Coffin, and it's clear that John Dwyer and his band of garage dwellers, rather than diluting their style from overexposure (Thee Oh Sees have put out 14 longplayers in the past decade in some form or other), the quartet are at supernova levels of intensity, ferocity and excellence. Like kindred spirit Ty Segall, Dwyer is a feverish maelstrom of energy with an endless supply of riffs, melodies and yelps at his disposal. And like Segall, who took his garage rock DNA and fused it with '70s-era hard rock on last year's Slaughterhouse, Floating Coffin is a ramped-up affair, perfectly augmenting last year's great Putrifiers II in almost every conceivable facet.

No Spell wafts along like a sonorous Californian pop number, Brigid Dawson's vocals deliberately flirting with the saccharine before being cut in half by a killer riff and Dwyer's ecstatic bark; the feverish growl of Strawberries 1 + 2 is a face-melter in the purest sense, before entering a intense motorik swirl into psych country; Night Crawler takes a left-turn into spaced-out phasers, before Sweet Helicopter lifts off, and back into the stratosphere we go. Toe Cutter/Thumb Buster best exemplifies the two extremes in the band's blueprint and is one of their best tracks because of it.

Dwyer even ropes in the likes of luminaries Kelley Stoltz and Lars Finberg (A-Frames, The Intelligence, whose presence is truly felt on penultimate killer, Tunnel Time), and the overall final product is addictive, breathtaking brilliance. Thee Oh Sees refuse to either burn out or fade away – long will they roam.