Concrete And Glass
Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, London
2 October 2008
When you go to a show by a shirtless, rabble-rousing mob like O’Death, you really expect to see the band set up on the floor, separated from their sweaty audience by little more than a few blobs of spit and sawdust. That’s how I imagined it anyway, so it is with some apprehension that I view the venue at the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen. With a sleek black interior, expensive light fittings and a stage at least three feet higher than I had hoped, this cold-fish setting makes me wonder how O’Death are ever going to manage to forge a connection with the notoriously cold-fish Hoxton punters.
Well, not to keep you all in suspense, they manage just fine. And while the renowned rollicking hillbilly energy of O’Death’s live set definitely goes some way towards melting the Hoxton ice, it’s the suprisingly intimate moments that really make the show. Whether it’s a lingering hand-clasp with an Andy Warhol lookalike, bonding with a shaven-headed metal dude over his “metal up your ass” Metallica t-shirt, or joshing about the (frequent and shrill) requests for their old songs, O’Death somehow make us feel like we’re all old friends. The band are relaxed, unhurried; they take luxurious breaks between songs, strumming, tuning, stroking their beards, and exhortations 
from the crowd are gently rebuffed – “gee, you guys are even more impatient than New Yorkers”. By the time O’Death are done, this hipster citadel seems as warm and jovial as if they’d been playing a pick-up gig in some whisky-soaked backroom – say, one belonging to a pub that charges a reasonable price for a pint.
If the joint (though packed to the gills) isn’t exactly jumpin’, you have to remember that this is still Hoxton, and no amount of down-home hoe-down spirit is going to get some of these haircuts to shake their skinny jeans. But a sizeable and raucous minority take up the mantle, whooping and stomping and hollering along boozily with the big numbers – particularly the sing-along hits “Fire on Peshtigo” and “Mountain Shifts”. By the time O’Death had kicked up the hootenanny to its glorious peak, an over-the-top metal take on “Allie Mae Reynolds”, even the impassive head-nodders were bobbing their heads in a decidedly down-home way. Nothing short of a triumph, really.
-Anton Allen-
