John Dwyer leads an instrumental jazz-garage chimera that’s far-out enough to escape predictability and ghoulish enough to go bump in the night.
Osees’ John Dwyer, a musical polymath adept at everything from prog-psych to the anthemic garage rock that soundtracked “Breaking Bad,” reconfigures sounds and lineups faster than a vaudeville star doing a quick-change. But he’s more savant than dabbler, and the albums keep coming, as frequent as they are diverse, a hit parade completed most recently by Witch Egg, an instrumental jazz-garage chimera peopled by Dwyer; drummer Nick Murray, a former Osees member; keyboardist Tom Dolas, a collaborator on last year’s Bent Arcana; saxophonist Brad Caulkins; and double bassist Greg Coates.
A lean collection of eight tracks under seven minutes, the group’s debut EP straddles dichotomies without losing itself to extremes: freewheeling and contained, exploratory but concise, easy to engage but far-out enough to escape predictability. Opener “Greener Pools” evokes Swedish psych rockers Dungen, a tangle of guitars and cymbals that cede to hypnotic saxophone riffs. From there, a few pinging notes that sound like a dial tone segue into screechy woodwinds on “City Maggot,” embellishing Dwyer’s synth and Murray’s steady drums in a marriage of chaos and order.
Though there are no lyrics, the names of these songs hint at a world akin to Osees’ 2019 album Face Stabber: a ghoulish vision full of Dark Crystal puppets, desolate as Escape From New York. There’s the titular “Witch Egg,” a funereal dirge that could just as easily soundtrack the dead rising from their graves, followed in close succession by “Baphomet,” “Arse,” and “On Your Own Now.” “Sekhu” might be a reference to a “biblical hill or watch-tower,” or—just as likely—it might mean nothing at all, no more or less real than a cast spell.
This holistic union of sound, atmosphere, and imagery propels the record. Listening to the wobbly, otherworldly drone of “Baphomet” after everyone else has gone to bed makes a dark room less trustworthy; the twitchy sax stalks disquietingly through its second half. The apotheosis of this heady vibe is “Sekhu,” where the throb of synth, the whine of saxophone, and the susurrus of cymbals sound like the last thing you hear before you find the skull on the album cover, an egg in its mouth.
Closer “On Your Own Now” eases up on the dread and the tempo, bringing in a bright saxophone and unhurried snares with a few sparkling keys that might even be considered hopeful. Is it alone like abandonment, or alone like one freed of a ghost? The last few seconds, when everything drops out but the reverberating drum beat, are less a definitive answer and more an ellipsis.
“This one is a burner designed optimally for your eco-pod sound system,” writes Dwyer in the band’s terse, inscrutable press release. “When you’ve left the world behind, you will need a soundtrack while you lay in dream stasis.” The best albums are prescient enough to predict the future, or precise enough to document the present. Slick as a ’70s horror film and dense and shrouded as a forest, Witch Egg’s improvisations feel like omens of future dystopia.
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