Label: City Slang (Europe)/ Ernest Jenning Record Co (USA) Format: CD
Head Home is a record which works its way into the subconscious, and O’Death are one of those bands who become such a fixture on the scene in a relatively short time that they are now a yardstick against which to measure similar bands. Country music – in its widest sense – has come a long way this century to recovering all the ground lost to rhinestones and Republicans in the Nineteen-eighties. Buegrass has certainly changed a bit, with groups like this playing their infectious take on the genre not so much like Country Gentlemen as front-porch punks – from New York, of course. Unlike, say, the Bad Livers, who whip up twisted banjo versions of Motörhead or Iggy Pop (as well as producing their own original material and covers of old-time classics), O’Death prefer to ramp up the tempo and take the music of the mountains into turbocharged realms not a million miles distant from the more traditional territory being gleeful mapped out by the massed ranks of The Hackensaw Boys or the deranged intensity of Old Time Relijun without straying to far from its roots either.
So they do songs about Jesus, mortality, drinking old booze, self-induced lonliness, ripped-up dresses, murder ballads and rickety fence teeth, and they perform them with so much verve and enthusiastic energy that it’s easy to get caught up inthe lurching swing. There are harmonised choruses of course, but they’re either belted out like O’Death are lusty pirates on shoreleave or mourners at a gospel funeral, while Greg Jamie‘s vocals sweep the ground before them, straining with a heartfelt high octave power. Gabe Darling does a fine job on the banjo, picking and strumming the melodies, and when the band goes wild, as they often do, he provides a solid line of tunekeeping. The fiddle playing of Bob Pycior provides scraping drones, shivering runs and choppy strokes, whirling into the backbrain with an insistent intensity matched by David Rogers-Berry‘s clattery post-agricultural percussion on gas cans and repurposed cutlery.
There is a sense of boundless energy being unleashed on this album, which makes Head Home such an enjoyable listen. The production sounds present and live, like the band are whipping up a frenzy onstage with a barnstormers like “O Lee O” or “All The World”, the soaring minor key whirl of “Only Daughter”, singing out their melancholy in the back room on “Travellin’ Man” or the twangy slow stomp of “Jesus Look Down”. Pretty much essential listening for the discerning fan of Americana, the only possible improvement would be seeing O’Death perform these songs live.
-Richard Fontenoy-
