Osees
Intercepted Message
IN THE RED
When a nymphomaniac tells you they’re drained from too much sex, it’s time to put on your pants and take a sex inventory. When an alcoholic raises an eyebrow at how many Old Fashioneds you’re throwing back, it’s time to put down the glass and fill out an addiction questionnaire. When John Dwyer says society is too overstimulated, it’s time for all of us to stop and consider how we’re living our lives—and listen to this new gem of an Osees record while we’re at it.
With the 12-song outing Intercepted Message, Dwyer set out to make a pop record that would appeal to those exhausted or simply bored from culture-killing technological “advancements” like AI and social media. The resulting album isn’t a cure-all, but by centering the record around a theme that informs both its music and lyrical content, the veteran musician has achieved a feat that can’t be derided as mere child’s play.
For this well-considered and expertly executed work, Dwyer returned to In the Red Recordings, the label that released two of his project’s best albums: Castlemania and Carrion Crawler, both from 2011. Intercepted Message, a paragon in how to make unleashed music sound carefully constructed (which it is), belongs in that company. It may be ironic when a madman tries to explain how to communicate sanely—but there’s also a beauty and truth to it, and Dwyer is aware if not deliberate about all of it. “Why search for something you can say? / What would the message be?” he asks on the title track. As is the case over the course of this album, Dwyer maintains a level of self-reflection that might not always come naturally to him and certainly isn’t apparent on every release by his project, which notoriously has almost as many aliases as JAY-Z.
A few months ago saw the release of Live at Levitation, which captured the magic of Dwyer and his band (then known as Thee Oh Sees) of merry pranksters playing live yet limiting themselves to a taut 40 minutes. There’s a similar effect here, with Dwyer corralling the mania that will always inherently exude from his project so that it can be not just diagnosed but savored and enjoyed. It probably helps that Osees currently boast their most consistent band configuration in more than a decade.
Intercepted Message is also, like every great pop record, a hell of a lot of fun. After a bevy of catchy, zany numbers (particularly rad are “Die Laughing” and “Blank Chems”), the album climaxes with closer “Always at Night,” a soulful, seven-minute serenade in which Dwyer sings throughout. Following one of Dwyer’s strongest compositions in recent memory is a two-minute coda: a modified version of the (in)famous Cisco default hold music. It’s as gut-bustingly hilarious as it is thematically apt. You gotta hear it to believe it—and you gotta stop simultaneously engaging in the trappings of technology to appreciate it. “Stop! Fuck!” he yells on “The Fish Needs a Bike.” Yes, do that, indeed.
