How do Thee Oh Sees do it? Currently the band has not toured in seven days. Is that enough time to write and record another album along with 20 or so loose ends to be scattered across various labels via 7″, flexi-disc, EP, and compilation? One would have to assume so.
This is probably the point in the article, the juncture in Thee Oh Sees career arc, in which we declare them “Hardest Working Band In America” and Budweiser does a 90-second documentary about it because blue collar living, ya'll. This we'll rest when we're dead mentality should wear Thee Oh Sees thin, ragged even, but a third edition of the Singles Collection proves to be just as vital as this year's Floating Coffin to the blossoming discography.
With tracks dating back to 2011, Vol.3 feels like a marriage between the odd turns of the live set and a time travel trip back to the days of The Master's Bedroom... These are the sore thumbs of a band who's gone hi-fi with tremendous grace. The collection feels skeletal and raw, a guiding light to the origin of a band who's got no cause for embarrassment for past output. Then there's tracks like “FB12”, which are mutant experimentations that feel like free jazz fused with the wild musings of Jim Jones orating to his Jonestown cult via megaphone. Finally for good measure, Thee Oh Sees pay their respects to fallen bear bar The Eagle Tavern with a live recording of “Block Of Ice”, which I can't help wondering if I was at this particular recording. Were it not for how rip-roaring drunk I was, frozen in awe of the wall to wall fever of bodies, I might have salvaged a few memory triggers in the recordings. So it goes, I did not.
Thee Oh Sees' Singles Collection Vol.3 is out November 26 on Castle Face Records in three color variations: half Pepto pink and half Coke bottle green; grape soda and French vanilla; and electric blue with a strawberry haze.
