Warm Slime (2010) is the tenth studio album by psych-garage band Osees. Best known for their wild, experimental, fuzz-addled sound and weird, cryptic lyrics from frontman and primary songwriter John Dwyer, they have captured many psychedelic hearts since their start in 1997. Beginning as the freak-folk band Orinoka Crash Suite, their band has gone through multiple name changes over the years.
In 2005, after releasing their album OCS 4: Get Stoved, John Dwyer orchestrated a lineup and band name change. As The Ohsees, they released The Cool Death of Island Raiders, soon followed by another name change and album release — The Oh Sees and Sucks Blood. Later that year came another rebrand as Thee Oh Sees alongside their album The Master’s Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In. They steadily released albums under this name until 2020, when they changed their name to Osees and released Protean Threat. They’ve stuck with this name for over a decade now, but who knows when they’ll change their name next!
I’m here to talk about the titular song on their 2010 album (released when they were called Thee Oh Sees), Warm Slime. ‘Warm Slime’ is thirteen minutes long, but it manages to keep the listener interested the whole time with its fuzzed-up guitar sounds, chugging bassline, and wild chants about summertime and the sky. The song begins with a fast-paced, energetic shout-along with a catchy riff, a classic but powerful drumline, and frontman John Dwyer’s barely coherent singing. A little over four minutes in, everything turns up from 10 to 100, melting whatever coherence there might have been into a cacophonous mess before calming down into drums and bassline. At this point, Dwyer leaves the chanting to a backing choir, continuing the repetitive lyrics about summertime. As the rest of the song progresses, the singing gets less and less intelligible, reducing all vocals to cut-up portions of words scattered here and there. The same bassline and drums continue for the rest of the song, with the occasional random clashing of several different guitars, until, in the final two minutes, the singing fades. As the drums and guitars slowly disappear, the listener is left with far-away studio sounds to end the song.
The entire experience ebbs and flows in such a way that the listener doesn’t even notice that thirteen minutes have passed. (On my first listen, my phone had already moved on before I realized it, autoplaying the next song in the queue: ‘Head On / Pill’ by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, a song particularly refreshing during manual labor.) I admire John Dwyer and his band’s patience to compose songs of this length that are capable of captivating the listener the whole time, immersing them in a magic pool of the crazy, wild Osees sound. It’s all strangely beautiful, with a big emphasis on both ‘strangely’ and ‘beautiful’. I give ‘Warm Slime’ 5 stars.
Atticus is an ordinary gender-indeterminate teenager who loves music and lives peacefully with their mom, father, second father, brother, and three cats.
