O'Death: Broken Hymns, Limbs & Skins
O'Death: Broken Hymns, Limbs & Skins
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Thursday, 18, Sep 2008 05:54
City Slang, out September 22nd.
In a nutshell...
You won't know what's hit you.
What's it all about?
Broken Hymns, Limbs & Skins is the third LP from O'Death and features 14 tracks from the five-piece. Songs range from the punky A Light That Does Not Dim to the creepy Ratscars, with sounds emerging from the gothic and macabre to speed country genres, folk, frenzied fiddle-playing, shrieking vocals and thrash metal.
Who's it by
O'Death hail from New York, where they formed while in college in 2003. However, you'd be forgiven for thinking they hail from the swamps of the Deep South - for Broken Hymns, Limbs & Skins is drenched in American gothic sounds and themes.
A Free Williamsburg review of their last LP, Head Home, not incorrectly links the band's sound to the Pogues, but there are other Irish tinges in there, mixed with a country influence, punk and bluegrass to produce a unique Americana sound.
Doing the gypsy-metal square dance are vocalist-guitarist Greg Jamie, fiddle player Bob Pycior, drummer David Rogers-Berry, bassist Newman (mysteriously the band's website doesn't give his first name) and finally Gabe Darling, who is a vocalist and "multi-instrumentalist". As far as I can tell, they all have appropriate beards to suit the genre.
As an example...
"Your kids have gone and left you to waste away yourself... Angeline, Angeline, all your friends on their hands and knees." - Angeline
"Our body splayed out before hateful eyeglances, I got more than I deserved." - Crawl Through Snow
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
I seriously doubt it, although that not to say the album isn't musically accomplished and, at the very least, original. O'Death are likely to be one of those bands that quietly tiptoe around and gain a loyal following but never having a truly universal appeal, which is no bad thing.
What the others say
"The vocals are pure Deliverance," said a paperthinwalls review of O'death's previous track Ground Stump.
"It's like the music from the O Brother Where Art Thou but with added darkness," a Cool Noise blogger remarked.
So is it any good?
I honestly don't know how to describe what I've just heard - apart from I've never punished my ears with stuff like this before and probably won't for a long time. Don't get me wrong - I'm up for trying out new music, but there's something about bands like this which I just find really pretentious - as if there's something tremendously arty and beautiful about it I'm not getting. Maybe I have been watching too many episodes of The Hills or something and I'm just not deep enough?
Anyway, the first track, Lowtide, starts harmlessly enough, but as the fiddles, pots and pans, manic drumming and guitar shrieks kick in, there's not really any let up apart from a few melancholic bursts in the dirge-like beats of Macabre and Angeline. Likeable material rears its head in Vacant Moan (which reminded me of the Stones' Paint It Black), but then it's all drowned out by lead singer Jamie, who, as Billboard magazine put it "sounds like the devil". He also reminded me a bit of the lead singer from Editors, although I'm pretty sure they're not going to include speed banjo in their next record.
There's a really similar theme running through all of the tracks; a kind of redneck-style hoedown sort of thing, which is interesting and different but I just really don't know who would listen to this for fun. The combination of styles is fun for the first few minutes but there's not enough melody to keep the whole thing running along smoothly, despite its breakneck speed - I actually felt myself wince when certain notes were played. I gave my friend a listen and he rather succinctly summed it by saying "it sounds like dead people doing a barn dance".
3/10
Isabel Plumbly