The aforementioned lyrics of opener “Begin Now!” accurately convey the uncanny experience of pressing play on a beloved band’s first album in 27 years and feeling like no time has passed. From that song’s muscular playfulness, to the eerie “Advice From the Oceans,” to the horn-led ebullience of “Timewaster,” The Same Place greets us like an old friend, albeit one who was always weird and inscrutable. All of the OTC hallmarks are here—the pop instincts of 1996’s Music From the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle, as well as the sound collage overlays of 1999’s Black Foliage: Animation Music. As the album goes on, though, a subtle departure from OTC’s ’90s material comes into focus. It’s not the noticeable weariness in Hart and Doss’ voices, nor the introduction of slicker recording technology—it’s a constant, lurking sense of darkness.
There’s always been a roiling uneasiness to OTC. It’s most apparent in their noise pieces, but even their most joyful pop songs obscured the sun with askew arrangements, queasy effects, or pitch-shifted vocals. Every earnest Beatles or Zombies impulse is refracted by a maze of acid-fried funhouse mirrors until it winds up in Pearls Before Swine or Syd Barrett’s ominous sidestreets. The Same Place casts shadows upon its brightest peaks—the punchy “Halfway Down,” the pristinely written “Garden of Light,” and even the gorgeous “California Demise 4.” Hart and Doss are more often florid than morbid, but the album reminds us that psychedelia, at its most powerful, rejects sunshine and lollipops in favor of ego death and headstones.
After the lively burst of the first three songs comes “The Spinning Continuous,” a winding, Hart-led epic that makes traditional Western understandings of death seem preferable to these shady ambiguities: “All your lives/Have you waited too long.” The crimson-tinted mix of strings, horns, organs, and demented guitars is stunning, extending an irresistible invitation to peer beyond the veil. Throughout the album—whether on the plaintive, John Cale-esque “Now Begin” or the shaggy hedge maze of the seven-part “Path of the Parallels” suite—Hart and Doss depict mortality in a way that is both vividly creative and terrifying. The fixation on temporal subject matter is spooky, playing like clairvoyant missives from beyond the grave.
