Thee Oh Sees: "Ruby Go Home"

A rock band thought: whatever happened to my rock and roll? Billy Corgan once told us rock is dead, but now I see him in a suit brushing his chin and I’m not so sure. The Asshole is still well and truly alive, always has been; if rock as sound went anywhere meanwhile, it drove underground, into the claws of people who maybe needed less, couldn’t sing (as well), didn’t know that success means money means failure, etc.

Thee Oh Sees slash the Oh Sees slash Ohsees slash OCS represent something like a common decency—the horrors of the world totally ignored: the ebola virus out there and killing people, the existence of Weezer (2008), those delicately flavoured cookies you get as a twofer that then fall apart in your sweaty cookie-crumbling grip, spring flu. None of that shit, and all the other Shit, is so much as approached on the Oh Sees’ forthcoming Help. Which to state up-front: awesome record. Holy Ghost of rock and roll material. “Ruby Go Home” is the highlight. Loopy twin guitars segue into a loopy rock chorus, before the song effectively becomes this band’s workout of their effects pedals. So in brief: smoke sirens, straight force!, baleful feedback-y applause, “for the sake of authority, motherfucker”; those are some of the phrases we could throw ‘round when discussing the cool freakout that splits this track into its present Holy Ghost status. John Dwyer doesn’t throw out routine lavish trills—his method’s basic, sorta predictable, the sound clouded over by reverb and echo—but, I mean, what fucking sounds! As if the band, after so much garage trash talk, decided to take the hare out of the cute plastic bag and instead of wondering what it all means (you can wonder later) just continued pulling and pulling till it all stopped making sense so they brought that twin guitar back, circular-like, to close off their space-jam. That sounds dumb, but this song isn’t.