John Dwyer has a surprise... While everyone eagerly anticipates the next Oh Sees record, he's been working tirelessly in his synth laboratory, hand-crafting a follow-up to last year's debut-one that shakes up the snow globe considerably. If Hubba Bubba was a brush with a robotic exoskeleton on deep-space patrol, 2015's Cold Hot Plumbs visits the alien world that sent it into the cosmos. Lush, textural and psychedelic, the songs breathe with a otherworldly sadness and heart. Barbed, sophisticated arrangements flower in every direction. The vintage-perfect sound palette would be window dressing if not for the songs themselves: fresh, vital, and above all catchier than the flu. Cold Hot Plumbs is a strange, beautiful, and oddly infectious addition to Dwyer's oeuvre, and not one to be missed. Ed.