oOoOO - “Hearts”
People don’t always realize that context is a choice, especially when it comes to digital music that you get from the internet. The particular clutch of bands with similar aesthetics as oOoOO—‘witch-house’ or whatever name you want to give it—were mired in context in 2010. What people said about music like this (and, heck, how these bands decorated their myspace pages) often seemed more important than whatever music it was all attached to. And yeah, in some cases that was true, but I also wonder if some of the musical ideas didn’t get a fair shake.
“Hearts” is pale and somewhat gothic, but it’s not crowded by blown-out, sludgy, contourless sounds. The bass rattles like cheap speakers in the back of a car, but it fits comfortably in the middle of the mix. The guitar licks sit like smoky echoes of Fleetwood Mac and the odd synth squiggles provide a wonderfully spacey foil for them. Whoever this singer (‘Miss Lisa’) is, she sounds wounded and distant without the explicitly druggy moans or—heaven forbid—faked rapping. It’s primarily headphone music, but sample the track, speed it up a few clicks, and yeah, I think you could even play this in the club. I guess my point with all of this is: don’t judge a band by its buzz. You might miss out on one of the year’s best songs.
oOoOO - oOoOO EP
“Greenspan feels so comfortable in his own skin that, by following his own unique patterns, he’s able to defy the confines of a genre that seems especially susceptible to bandwagon-jumping.”
All due respect to Zach Kelly and his serviceable review of this EP (posted today), but that sentence kinda strikes me as a method of dodging the snark of the haters while placating the eagerness of the lovers. I mean, I know things move fast in Internet Land and the ‘drag / witch-house’ conversation has been happening for all of six months, but to talk about it as a ‘bandwagon’ with mores that one can already ‘defy’ might be getting a bit ahead of yourself. When I started thinking about how I wanted to describe the oOoOO EP, my first instinct was to frame it as a ‘good introduction’ to what Christopher Dexter Greenspan does. But I quickly realized that four of these six tracks have been available as mp3s and on Greenspan’s early Disaro CD-R all along. They do not represent some kind of implicit reaction against a pre-established set of ideas—they are in fact the very songs that helped create the set of ideas—and aren’t so much a taste of Greenspan’s work as they are a large portion of his cumulative body.
Of course, I also understand that this is an inherently song-based art form in a market that is rapidly expanding with, yes, some trend-hoppers, so oOoOO putting out anything more than another quickly-circulated demo song feels like next-level development even when it’s not. Though until recently there hasn’t been a ‘scene’ of people working in it, spooky, slowed-down, hip-hop influenced music is not all that wacky or difficult an idea and its burgeoning divisive popularity makes sense. I think a lot of the problems people have expressed with it—that it’s silly and trendy and takes itself too seriously—stem from the unavoidable fact that, at its core, witch-house is largely about fashion (and your reaction to that word says much more about you than it does about anyone who makes music). There’s such a heavy focus on inscrutably meaningless imagery and iconography that folks go so far as to get triangle tattoos or spell their band name ‘oOoOO’ when it’s just pronounced “Oh.” That’s why, even though the term ‘witch-house’ is more musically accurate, I think ‘drag’ is the unintentionally best descriptor for this stuff. Not only does it speak to the drugged-out slowness of something like EP opener “Mumbai,” it also suggests the way that these creepy, haunting vibes are put on and performed like a kind of theater. Greenspan and his peers have essentially discovered what expressionists and the makers of horror films have known for decades: with a little makeup and the right lighting, you can transform the mundane into the mysterious.
Given all that, I am no less convinced by this EP that oOoOO are some of the best and most captivating practitioners of this sound. I speak about it as a plural now (like ‘are’=band, ‘is’=person) because Greenspan’s best songs are almost always the more focused affairs that feature the mewling vocal talents of a woman known only as Miss Lisa. I was not the first and will not be the last to praise centerpiece “Hearts” as one of the year’s best songs, and here it serves as a rock-solid example of the appealing immediacy Greenspan and Lisa can have when they strike the right balance of impulses. The beat is slow enough to give the chord progression emphatic heft but spritely enough to suggest danceable club music, and it’s perfectly balanced with ear-grabbing textural flourishes and a lovely gothic melody. “Plains is Hot” employs similar dynamics but adds high, wailing, middle eastern-sounding samples in place of buzzy, rattling bass. The airy, auto-tuned “Burnout Eyess,” though not as melodically fresh, has one of oOoOO’s most pop-friendly vibes, while its Visions Of Trees remix skews organic and swampy. Throughout each of these, Lisa’s voice is soft and timid enough to feel sympathetically vulnerable in the midst of warped and screwy environs.
If there’s a key to successful ‘drag’ music, it’s that sense of human frailty. The slowed-down club-hop from which a lot of the oOoOO EP descends was made to mimic the psychedelic effects of cough syrup while retaining the steely toughness of gangster rap, so softening that ethos with this constructed sense of goth mystery puts it in much more listenable pop territory, however flashy and ‘flimsy’ an aesthetic it might be. I’m not necessarily looking forward to a full album of this stuff—even if it’s done as well as oOoOO are capable of doing it—I just want a few more sweet singles to pepper into the rotation.
