Posted by tonywonder in 2010 | 0 Comments
O’Death, feat. desolation
I saw this band open for Dan Deacon several years ago in a bunker or perhaps a ditch on the desolate outskirts of Chicago, and think it’s an accomplishment of the highest caliber that they generated a positive response from a teeming horde of post-teenage irony-practitioners – but thus is the power of five ramshackle Brooklynites and a drummer covered in tattoos (like a pirate!), packed like sardines on a nearly ground-level stage, sermonizing about wistful debauchery (not to mention an unbelievable, breakneck cover of “Nimrod’s Son”) to a crowd drunk on Deacon’s Casio keyboard pop, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
O’Death are an arch, macabre, and syphilitic version of Fleet Foxes (or Iron and Wine or Will Oldham or some other darkhorse choice of millenial hipster folkie – for the record, vocalist Greg Jamie admirably echoes both Oldham’s strained warble and Sam Beam’s beard-and-bald cocktail…so that’s something); there’s really no greater compliment than that. Other references include Tom Waits’s mid-80s output – when Waits finally got over the sad-sack barroom ballads and started dry-humping accordions and rasping stories about bourbon-soaked jockeys, crooked shell games, and one-eyed Indonesian hookers like all the Great American Songwriters eventually do (still waiting, Stevie Wonder…still waiting) – except melded with downright mainstream harmonization, Appalachian instrumentation, and of course, dalmatian sensation.
They are one with the various historic forms of the elegant dirge – the pirate shanty, the gypsy hoedown, the hobo seance, the possibly-incestuous West Virginian shotgun wedding reception – so much so that they will probably not release their very best album until each respective bandmember is dead, buried, and pulling minimum wage as the resident pervert-ghost of various bordellos in and around New Orleans, perpetually drunk on cheap ghost-liquor and lusting after the living, floating through walls and doors long after the novel thrill of doing so is gone. Until then, Outside is available on April 19; in the meantime, I suggest a bathtub full of moonshine and, if you wish, a Krazy straw. Go nuts.
(O’Death is currently on tour, and while they won’t be stopping by in the dairy state, you can catch them in Chicago at the Beat Kitchen on April 9)
