Makes Me Stronger (O’Death, Tonic)

No, they’re not an Irish heavy metal band.

It can be difficult to explain exactly what O’Death is, but it’s completely worth the effort.  Their self-released CD Head Home is the first album this year that’s grabbed me, shaken me, demanded I listen.

A reviewer on CD Baby dubbed their music “Appalachian apocalypse” and that’s as accurate a label as any.  The sound is ancient but immediate, mythic, Gothic, American.  Acoustic and explosive, percussive but melodic.  Morbidly obsessed, bursting with life.  By adding that almost too-cute apostrophe to the title of the traditional song, their name serves as both a plea and a possessive.  Great music is never just one thing, and these guys scramble to embrace every dichotomy within reach while plummeting towards the inevitable singularity.

End of Times, all the time.  History as perpetual conclusion.  The CD should come in a knotted pine box.

It opens with a plucked toy ukulele.

O’Death – Down to Rest (mp3) (buy)

That’s Gabe Darling, who switches off between the baby uke and banjo.  Darling looks a little like Martin Mull, an unstable blond bowlcut, wire-rimmed glasses.  He plays seated – almost all of them do – but cannot sit still.  He tends to swivel, whether his seat does or not; knees bent, he’ll pivot on the tips of his toes.

The first voice you hear, there, belongs to Greg Jamie.  He bears an uncanny resemblance to Alec Ounsworth, had Ounsworth never met a razor, and also has an affected voice.  But while the Clap Your Hands singer sounds like a cross between David Byrne and Bob Dylan, Jamie sounds like every rusted screen door in the country slamming shut, all at once.  There’s more character than clarity.  He sounds grizzled, wise, desperate.  He sounds about 308 years old.

Until you talk to him and realize he’s not old at all.  Mid-twenties, maybe?  Almost the whole group, which you’d swear’d been scooped wholesale off a West Virginian back porch, is from New York.  “I don’t know,” Jamie said, “What’s a New York band supposed to sound like?”

I’ve seen them twice over the past month – this past Sunday at Tonic, and at Midnight on the first Monday in May at Sin-é – and the act is too ferocious to be just an act.  There’s a genuine love of traditional music here, and though they have a good sense of humor about themselves they make like a band possessed, channeling something deep and dark and unsettlingly familiar.  There are six of them, in the live band, and when they all sing – they all do – their unamplified howls sometimes sound like a church revival, sometimes like a chain gang, sometimes like a thousand Tom Waitses giving birth.  If any of what I’ve said sounds off-putting, don’t let it be.  It’s not ceremony, it’s celebration.  It’s a wake, not a funeral.

Jamie – who also plays acoustic guitar, crossing and uncrossing his legs as he strums –  and Darling are the main songwriters.  If you’re still listening to “Down to Rest,” they’re first joined by percussionist David Rogers-Berry (according to the band’s myspace page, his job is “whoopin’ it up”) and fiddler Bob Pycior.  Rogers-Berry – originally from South Carolina, he’s the group’s sole Southerner – can be dark-alley terrifying  He rattles chains before slamming them into an overturned gas can, stomps around with a tambourine on his foot, smashes his trash-can cymbal like it said something downright unpleasant about his ma.  Everything thuds and crashes.  No snare?  “Yeah,” he said, pointing.  “Piece of shit.  It’s broken.”  Don’t fix it.

Pycior, whom the group shares with prog-metal group Skeletonbreath, might be the most important element of the live show.  Everybody else is propulsive, if not percussive, plucking and strumming and yelping and pounding.  Though occasionally going pizzicato, the fiddle usually slurs, sometimes soars; it gives you something to hang on to, so’s you don’t get driven off a cliff.

They’re rounded out by a mandolin (which sort of gets lost in the shuffle) and a bass (perfunctory, though I found myself wishing it was a tuba – and what do you know, on the record there’s a euphonium).

Despite the instrumentation, this isn’t bluegrass.  There’s a rock drive to much of the music – the myspace page lists “punk energy” (along with “whiskey”) as one of their influences – and there’s neither an emphasis on virtuosic musicianship nor indulgent jambandery.  It’s music that should appeal to anyone passionate for passionate music.  Wolf Paraders, ManManners, even Decemberistas, give it a listen.  Later-Waits fans, definitely.  The encore at Tonic was the Pixies’ “Nimrod’s Son.”  There you go.  It’s not exclusive.

Nor is Head Home a one-note assault.  There are real songs, and moments of startling loveliness.  “Only Daughter” breaks into a harmonic croon that’d do CSNY proud.

O’Death – Only Daughter (mp3) (buy)

Mournful, beautiful.

A great album, top to bottom, and I have a new favorite track every day.  For a while I couldn’t stop listening to “O Lee O,” a hurricane of a number that’s as shocking when it retreats into its eye as when it blows the roof off.  “Travelin’ Man,” all banjo, guitar, vocals and birdcalls, is humble, plaintive (“all I done will do you wrong... I got nobody left to call me ‘friend’”).  “Nathaniel” (which makes a great show-closer) is a bayou funeral march (is that a death rattle, or a phone ringing?) in which the horse-drawn hearse – Lawdy, Lawdy! – cuts loose.

You should see them live.  They generate, seated, a good deal more energy than 99% of your dancey-dancey post-punkers.  Even when no one’s there.  Especially when no one’s there:  At the Sin-é show, as late as it was, they played to a mostly-empty bar; it gave the group’s din room to grow.  Some guy, tired, tried to drag his girlfriend away.  “We HAVE to stay,” she said, “Because this is REALLY GOOD.”

The band’s site doesn’t seem to be up and running (it doesn’t work for me, at least), but upcoming dates – and two more songs – are on their myspace page.  The next show is some party in Bushwick, but starting June 7th they start a month-long residency at Pete’s Candy Store.  Come August they head West.

• Their shows are also the best place to find their record:


• Online, it’s only available at CD Baby (I wouldn’t suggest the whole Paypal/e-mail the band thing – long story). 


• Copies are supposedly available at Mondo Kim’s on St. Marks and Cake Shop.  (Hopefully it’ll find its way to Insound and Other Music, soon.)


• More endorsements from Aquarium Drunkard and Suckapants (who has much better pics than mine, from a different show)

*

tags: odeath  concert reviews  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    reddit