When you hear Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer is doing a vintage synthesizer-driven album, it sounds like a natural fit. His best stuff is endlessly-repeated guitar riffs that should fit nicely into a loop-based structure, and his worst stuff is meandering tone exploration, which should be perfectly easy to create out of analog synth puddles.
And that's pretty much exactly how that shit went down. Unfortunately there's too much of the latter, simmering little synth buzzes that count on you being really, really interested in texture. I love texture. I'm all about texture, but there's still not enough here. The reason to get on board are those few cases where he goes for the throat, with bigass buzzy basses on the opener and highlight Sic Bay Surprise, which unsurprisingly, are the most rockist songs on the album. Grab those for kickass night driving mixes, but the album on the whole's just too muddy, drenched in signature falsetto and newfound variations on the same old muck 2.5/5
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