O’Death Interview

admin on Sep 6th 2007

The drummer rises from his stool, wailing, bare-chested, whipping chains from the grip of each hand against a kit of rusty old canisters, spurring on the rest of the band like an infuriated slave driver. The tempo is driven by a hardcore-punk ethos, the lyrics are tinted with the macabre, and the songs sound old enough to be yellowed and smoke-stained. This is O’Death: the sound of an Appalachian apocalypse, a band of musical misfits that escape classification and outpace tradition – a set of parameters bound to cause trouble.

Named after a traditional song sung by coal miners, field workers, and chain gangs, O’Death are a phenomenon if only for the staggering array of pastoral clichés they’ve inspired amongst reviewers. It seems they can hardly be mentioned without talk of hell-raising hootenannies, saloon shootouts, and moonshine-fuelled gospel choirs. But beyond the stigmatic imagery, it should be no surprise that many try to plaster over the difficulties in labelling their music, as they’ve never considered themselves one thing or another. If said as they intend it, the name itself suggests a mournful call of familiarity, implying both a merciful appeal and a sense of familial belonging. Fitting, then, that it’s in the midst of ambiguity where the band have made a habit of overturning expectations.

Drummer David Rogers-Berry’s grunge stylings are flanked by the blistering, drunken violin of Bob Pycior, the latter appearing as stringed music’s wayward son, outcast from all civilised ensembles. Compared to these characters, banjoist Gabe Darling just looks like the fine young man who fell in with the wrong crowd and was led astray. Yet none seem more out of place than Jesse Newman. With his top perpetually off, caked in sweat, beer gut hanging out and cigarette perched amid a menacing grin, he’d seem more at home in Pantera than in a throwback to a bygone era. “That’s true,” he laughs. “…You got me. I learned to play music through heavy metal, but with O’Death I was able to re-create myself as a musician.”

Ever since, defying preconceptions hasn’t been a problem…particularly when people hear they’re from Brooklyn. “When I joined this band, I said the same thing as everyone else – it’s crazy that these guys are from New York – but we’re living in an age where everything is not only accessible, but reproducible. So why should the music or culture of an older time and place be off limits? With us, it really didn’t feel forced at all. This is the music we enjoy listening to.”

Of course, that there are problems over categories and origins in the first place is simply down to their doing something different. Being outside the home of all that’s traditionally southern is the very thing that has allowed them to take liberty with the prefix of alt-country, warping the sound until it’s akin to an acid western. In a time when there are countless artists drifting through the planes of Americana music, it’s only after listening to O’Death that you realise few have put more than a foot in the direction towards evolving the genre at all.

“When I think of bluegrass, I think of different instruments, taking turns soloing over a very standard format and this certainly ain’t like that,” insists Newman. “It incorporates elements of old country music, sure, but this is somethin’ else,” he laughs. “When people ask me on the street, I say we’re a punk-rock band. That’s the sort of energy I go for.”

While the band rouse “mosh pit-like reactions” in their hometown, the rest of America is a different story. “They’re pretty stand-offish at first; they don’t know what they’re going to hear. I mean it’s a pretty weird scene on stage, I’ll admit that…but usually the crowds seem unable to help themselves. People are boppin’ their heads, smilin’ and clappin’, screamin’ right along with us.”

Having driven cross-country in borrowed cars for 30-hour stints, they’ve travelled through the heartland of their influences, ready to step on some traditionalist toes by playing towns where anything ‘country’ is close to sacred. “Those might be a few of the people who find us distasteful! Most of them say things like: ‘not authentic’, or ‘oh, they’re New Yorkers’, but I’ve never met anyone that didn’t have a good time at our shows. Those that expect a kind of purity, well…I’m too dirty for them – and I’m perfectly happy with that!”

After self-releasing two LPs, O’Death were snapped up by City Slang and Ernest Jenning Records, where a new and improved version of Head Home has been re-released. Though suitably gritty, their inclination to record with drunken enthusiasm, at breakneck speed, and while on a budget, has given their output a rougher feel than they would have liked. “I love lo-fi recordings with just a couple of mics in a room, but it’s difficult to get everybody heard. We’ve re-mastered it now because the sound we went for was too much. We did a real rushed job on it. At the time, we had to borrow money. Actually I wouldn’t even call it borrowing, some friends of ours really supported us in putting the album together. They believed we could do something good with it.”

Though the finished product doesn’t quite do them justice, the material serves as a signpost to their live shows, where believers are quickly made of bystanders. It’s a spectacle that can be, at times, a little scary – an energetic momentum with enough testosterone behind it to have onlookers hurrying down their drinks. “We try to get it up early; then it sustains itself and just doesn’t go down again. I often lose my voice because I’m just screaming at the top of my lungs without a microphone. It’s even happened to Greg that he’s gotten sick. Generally a few of us sound like dogs.”

It’s this ferocious howling that makes a cover of Pixies’ “Nimrod’s Son” sound so natural that it only underlines the group’s rockier leanings. In fact when they’re at their best, the dynamic behind O’Death’s sound makes one wonder whether a slight change in instruments would dramatically overhaul people’s perception of the band. “I feel that the instrumentation is very important. To switch it to a more generic setup like all guitars would work, but it’d be more straight-ahead rock-pop.” Similarly, Newman is as quick to rule out an all-acoustic setup. “I’ve thought about trying an upright bass and going completely traditional but I think doing that would definitely change the way the band feels too. The electric bass adds that component of modernity. It’s part of what makes the whole sound ‘today’ instead of 100 years ago.”

Ultimately, this lying somewhere in-between won’t allow them to escape the talk of creaking porches and darkened backwoods, or the frequent likening of their music to Tom Waits in a musical Deliverance. For now, though, O’Death are intent on drawing what they can from these analogies – even the bad ones. “There was one description that was supposed to be insulting but I think we ended up using it as promotional material. They said our singer sounded like a baby manatee being savaged by a pack of feral cougars. It doesn’t get much better than that.”