OCS is a side project for
John Dwyer, leader/founder of the San Francisco-based
Coachwhips -- and like a lot of side projects,
OCS doesn't sound anything like the artist's primary gig. The
Coachwhips favor a noisy, distorted, raw, primal and hard-rocking blend of alternative rock, punk and garage rock; they aren't very musical, but despite their limitations,
Dwyer's
Coachwhips are exhilarating and undeniably infectious.
OCS, on the other hand, is a lot more reserved and nuanced;
2 is perhaps best described as an experimental, oddly appealing mixture of folk-rock and avant-garde noise rock. On these recordings -- which were made over a two-year period from 2001-2003 --
Dwyer plays a calm, reflective, even pastoral acoustic guitar that interacts with bizarre collages of dissonant electro-noise. It's almost as if he united the picker school of acoustic folk-rock guitar playing -- that is, musicians like
John Fahey,
Leo Kottke, Peter Lang and
Stefan Grossman -- with the noisemakers of rock's avant-garde (although
2 has its share of vocals and isn't strictly an instrumental album). People in the jazz world like to describe this type of approach as "inside/outside" -- in other words, contrasting something that is conventional with something that is left of center.
2 isn't jazz, although it demonstrates that inside/outside contrasts can also work well if a musician has folk and rock on his mind.
Dwyer's experimentation doesn't always pay off on this eccentric album; occasionally, he stumbles and drops the ball. But more often than not, the things that he tries are successful -- and overall, the folk-rock acoustic guitar and the dissonant electro-noise have an odd way of complementing one another. This enjoyably intriguing, if slightly uneven, release makes one hope that
Dwyer will have more
OCS projects outside of
Coachwhips. ~ Alex Henderson