Warm Slime

Ridiculously, fabulously prolific, San Francisco’s garage-rock kingpins seem to release a record each full moon. (EPs show up on the half-moon.) Lesser bands might think twice about exactly how to follow up 2009’s *Help* — a title that earned high marks all around — but John Dwyer and his intrepid band mates are fearless. Yes, the 13-minute opening track stretches before you, like a dark chasm of unknown depths, but you faithfully leap in, to be richly rewarded: “Warm Slime” chugs and oozes and churns, and two minutes in, the tune morphs into a soul-stomping blues riff, only to slowly strip down to a barebones groove. By song’s end, several permutations have taken place, and each one mesmerizes. (Once you’re in, there’s no going back.) It’s trip-rock for the 2000s, and due to either sheer chutzpah or wily cunning, Thee Oh Sees are one of very few bands willing to put a track like that up front and center. The brilliant, bombastic “Castiatic Tackle” and “Mega-Feast” or the noisily gleeful “I Was Denied” would all likely be opening tracks if the band ever did what’s expected. Happily, they don’t. Hallelujah.

Prolific San Francisco psych band continues to make engagng bite-size garage-pop, like contemporaries Fresh & Onlys and Sic Alps.

For a band that sound as if they subsist on a steady diet of cheap hallucinogens, Thee Oh Sees are an admirably ambitious bunch; Warm Slime is the fourth album in three years from John Dwyer and his roving band of psychedelic marauders, and if the liner notes are to be believed, they committed this album to tape in a single day in 2009.