Biography

When he isn't frying amps and bending minds with the psychedelic garage prog sounds of his band Oh Sees, John Dwyer makes oddball pop built around vintage synths and wonky electronics with his Damaged Bug project. The first album, 2014's Hubba Bubba, was a homecooked, insular slice of keyboards and weirdness, and each record that followed edged closer to full-band, blown-out rock territory, with 2020's tribute to Michael Yonkers, Bug on Yonkers, sounding very much like an Oh Sees album. Dwyer started making music under the name Damaged Bug in 2014, roughly a month after Thee Oh Sees embarked on what turned out to be a brief hiatus. With this project, Dwyer moved away from the guitar-bass-drums setup to instead create music using vintage synthesizers, drum machines, and a variety of one-of-a-kind electronic gizmos. Damaged Bug made its debut with the album Hubba Bubba, recorded in the fall of 2013 at Dwyer's home studio. Castle Face Records, Dwyer's label, released the album in January 2014. He continued the project, even while reviving Thee Oh Sees. In fact, that band's 2015 record, Mutilator Defeated at Last, was released a mere two weeks before the second Damaged Bug album, Cold Hot Plumbs. Dwyer's pace continued to be somewhere north of frenetic as he cranked out two Thee Oh Sees albums in 2016 as well as overseeing Castle Face and their steady onslaught of releases. He wedged in time to record another Damaged Bug album though, and the looser, more live band-sounding Bunker Funk was released in early 2017. Dwyer stayed busy for a bit, but when he decided to make a Damaged Bug album, a nasty case of writer's block derailed the process. To get things back on track he roped in members of Thee Oh Sees (keyboardist Tomas Dolas, vocalist Brigid Dawson, and drummer Nick Murray) to tackle the songs of one of Dwyer's all-time heroes, Michael Yonkers. Bug on Yonkers, a blistering, guitar-heavy nine-song collection of Yonkers' songs drawn from his classic 1968 record Microminiature Love and other sources, was released in April of 2020. ~ Mark Deming & Tim Sendra