(album, In The Red)
This is head food for hungry heads. Whereas the Californian combos last outing, Warm Slime saw them surpassing escape velocity and firing volleys of blazing garage-shaped nuggets across the firmament, Castlemania resumes in the realms of Barrett-esque whimsy and blue cheer psychosis where Warm Slime’s closing track ‘MT Work’ left us writhing in ecstasy.
Taking the fifteen tracks collectively, Castlemania is a remarkable album that manages to pretty much explore the entire spectrum of coloured sound while being simultaneously restrained and uninhibited. While there’s no thirteen-minute long doors-of-perception shattering freakouts on offer this time around, the disc is very much a trip.
There’s some kind of TARDIS style funny business going on here – it felt as if I was exploring the labyrinths of Castlemania for days, and yet the small LCD readout on my player tells me that it was less than 50 minutes. Although the tracks collected here hang together perfectly as a body of work, the amount of variety that Thee Oh Sees pack onto a sliver of plastic and metal perhaps explains my disorientation.
Separating the album into two halves, divided by the brief outtasite interlude of ‘Spider Cider,’ the first section features six songs that exist within singular generic pockets and yet still provide a rewarding sequential experience. It runs like this – opener ‘I Need Seed’ pitches us down amid waves of holy modal folkery, before the syncopated freakbeat of ‘Corprophaigist (A Bath Perhaps)’ takes over. ‘Stnking Cloud’ floats in on zephyrs of synth-infused Barrettisms, born aloft by exultations to ‘take your time and defrost your mind’, before the diaphanous threads of the track are obliterated as the nasty, jackhammer garage of ‘Corrupted Coffin’ tumbles through floors of discordant squall and crunchy fuzz. ‘Pleasure Blimps’ brings respite, as shards of typically English psychedelic whimsy are superheated and projected along the pitted walls of the mind’s own Haight-Ashbury, then ‘A Wall, A Century 2’ brings heavier elements to the kaleidoscope of sound, exploding any hope for equilibrium as chemical elves chirrup in the undergrowth.
And the seventh brings return.
As we are propelled around to the dark side of the disc, ‘The Whipping Continues’ reveals lysergic sound prisms that flicker with light that you can hear, before the crystalline simplicity of ‘Blood On The Deck’ provides a ergonomic mix of rolling rhythms, endlessly arcing solos and insistent harmonies. The album’s title track is suitably exalted; ethereal and stratospheric, it feeds head and heart by tapping into the music of the spheres.
Things become louder now – ‘AA Warm Breeze’ is a twisted bloom. A hybrid of kazoo kraziness, harp hysteria and malefic vocals, it convincingly references the Mothers of Inventions’ summer of love/hate rootsisms. In the same realm, ‘Idea For Rubber Dog’ evokes Beefheart, with its unhinged lo-fi effervescent elephantisms that give way to the pastoral psych synth overture of ‘The Horse Was Lost’. ‘I Won’t Hurt You’ takes Castlemania on to the home straight, the number is a crepuscular freak-a-billy siren song that sounds as if it were recorded while Suicide squatted in the corner of a crypt. ‘If I Stay Too Long’ restores sanity, albeit via a laconic tripped-out love call that ushers in the mournful, valedictory, ‘What Are We Craving?’
Castlemania sees Thee Oh Sees exploring the simultaneous dimensions of inner and outer space, and doing it with a range and dexterity that few bands can match. Check it out.
Thee Oh Sees: www.theeohsees.com/
Order Castlemania direct: www.intheredrecords.com/pages/order-intl.html
