#castleface

À La Ô Terre is the first album for Population II, and the band’s three members — Tristan Lacombe on guitar/organ, Pierre-Luc Gratton on vocals/drums & Sébastien Provençal on bass— seem not to have established much of a track record yet in other projects. That makes this very accomplished, engrossing debut all the more impressive. They jump right into this headfirst and come up swimming.

That’s true of the album, too, which starts in a very strong way with “Introspection,” a looming, foreboding, wide angle groove which arcs out over a foreboding bass line and chant-sung vocals into tumultuous free-for-all spates of guitar solo-ry. Gratton’s voice is surrounded by lots of echo, so that it seems to rattle around in large, high vaulted sonic space, a smoke-wispy, blues-rock-ish presence among wild frenzies of instrumental free for all. For “C’est Ne Réve,” Lacombe switches to organ, laying an eerie drone under Gratton’s whispery vocals. The cut is initially rather subdued, but it breaks out into squalling reeling bursts of keyboard and carpet bombing onslaughts of drums. There’s a big guitar solo at the end, and a saxophone solo, so the band ends in a swirl and a ferment of loud intoxicating sound.

The cuts alternate between subterranean menace and wigged out extremities of sound, and “Il Eut un Silence dans le Ciel” is perhaps the most consistently balls-out of these tracks. But even it pulls in its guns periodically in a precisely paced, ritual interval that shifts its weight from side to side like a very large person attempting to dance.

All of these songs were built out of improvisation, and threads of melody sometimes carry over from one track into the next. Still, while there’s definitely a wild energy, none of the tracks feel excessive or undisciplined. They push the boundaries of what a song is, as most long-form psych does, but they don’t entirely leave it behind.  

The Osees have evolved over time, with various players coming and going as regularly as the band name is altered, but this is a particularly skilled and cohesive iteration.  Dwyer is, as always, the center, but everybody gets a moment. The two drummers, Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone, whom you might remember from the Modey Lemon, hold down the rhythms with the forceful, violent precision that these cuts require, playing hard but intricately.  Tim Hellman, who played with Sic Alps and currently is in Flat Worms, anchors the fast cuts with rupturing exactness, but lends a dubby, nodding poetry to the laid-back ones like “Red Study." Tom Dolas, who records as Mr. Elevator, kicks in the eerie, futuristic keyboards that push certain grooves (“Said the Shovel”) into ESG-playing-“U.F.O” expansiveness.  

The pieces are solid, but what is very fine is the way they fit together, whether in the frenzied, guitar-caroming-down the neck opener “Scramble Suit II” or the heat-hazed, in-the-pocket shuffle of “Canonpr ’74.” Osees have a seething, roiling intensity that, nonetheless, makes room for its components; there is no stepping on other people’s parts.  There’s also an antic sense of play in many of these cuts, as in “Dreary Nonsense” where jump-cut riffs end in vibrating finale notes, like a punch line, a reaction shot, a cartoon villain running into a frying pan. It’s not dreary at all, more like sticking your finger into a light socket, but fun.  

It is hard to hear the lyrics most of the time—and probably superfluous.  They seem to rhyme and scan better than they convey information.  Still, you might be struck by a verse from “Upbeat Ritual,” in which Dwyer chants, “I know you’ve got the beast by the collar all the time, hopping on the root cellar jangling the chain all the time, let’s run loose, let’s run wild all the time.”   The cool thing about Protean Threat is that he’s got the beast and the collar. He can let things run wild in complicated ways while also keeping it wholly and brilliantly under control.   Let’s not mince words. This is one of the best rock albums of 2020.