SHOW HER THAT YOU LOVE HER

I love to hear something really unusual.

The Oh Sees [also known as Thee Oh Sees, OCS and Orange County Sound] were set up by John Dwyer of Coachwire/Pink and Brown/The Hospitals as an experimental project. It happened to develop into something pretty great; a fully-formed band, capable of everything from yelping psychedelics, to the most elegant of love songs (see above). Brigid Dawson's vocals are what make this song special; the sisterly advice of a Louisiana housewife piped through a long-distance phonecall.

I don't know how interested I am in doing some hackjob here, dredging up any number of tired equations of bands they only vaguely sound like. I always had a problem with that tendency in music journalism; to dilute the experience of an album through listing who or what it sounds like. [At best, it turns Rufus fans onto Parenthetical Girls. At worst, it shows how mainstream music journalism is caught up in the very kind of industry bullshit it initially set out to expose.] I know it's essentially to make the process of choosing albums easier for music fans on lower incomes, but internet freedom renders this null and void. 

When it comes down to it, I acknowledge that Animal Collective take influence from Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson, but that's not why I like Animal Collective. Maybe it's just me, but I've always approached music as a physical experience rather than as a cerebral exercise. A lot of the time, I don't want a literal explanation for what I'm hearing. I don't need to know the lead singer's name. I don't care where they recorded the thing. Sometimes I'm not bothered about seeing a band live, although I might have loved their work. This possibly makes me a thrifty little fart, but I no longer see any correlation between truly loving an album and the drive to consume, consume, consume everything related to the artist.

And by GOD do I know what the flipside looks like. I was a rabid Spice Girls fan and used to buy these 5-packs of unbelievably overpriced photographs of the band. They were sold in foil packaging so that myself and my 10 year old friends couldn't distinguish the quality of the what we were buying with our meagre £3 a week. Or later, when I was 14 and married to the lead singer of KoRn in my head, it took me six months to track down/ship over their VHS tape which contained all their promo vids. No Youtube back then, kids. Hell, I didn't have dial-up until 2002. It took three days to download one song [a live recording of KoRn singing 'happy birthday' to Fred Durst] from Napster. That's right, NAPSTER. Before Lars Ulrich ruined our nu-metal fun.

Christ, I'm getting old.