Plastic Plant

There's a subtle wrongness to "Plastic Plant" that takes a moment to identify — the melody is almost too bright, the hooks slightly synthetic, the warmth just a degree or two off from natural. This is deliberate. The song plays with the aesthetics of psych-pop accessibility while undermining them from inside: something that looks alive but isn't quite, cheerful in a way that produces mild dread on close listening. The guitar work has a jangly, almost paisley-era quality in its surface texture, but the chord movements underneath it keep resolving somewhere unexpected, refusing the comfort they seem to promise. The drumming is crisp and propulsive in a way that feels almost too clean for Oh Sees, which is itself part of the unsettling effect. Dwyer's vocal performance here is arch and knowing, pitched at the register of a narrator who understands the joke the listener hasn't caught yet. The lyrical frame — artificial life standing in for real life, simulation dressed as substance — is a recurring preoccupation in their catalog but rarely rendered with this much surface pleasantness. It's the kind of song that sounds great coming out of a car radio in a strip mall parking lot on a gray afternoon, which is probably the point: the artificial and the mundane rhyming perfectly, neither one particularly concerned about being caught.