Words by Jake Jones

Ok – first up, let’s get things out in the open. Let’s NOT compare O’Death with Gogol Bordello. Just because both bands have fiddlers does not mean they are the same! O’Death have real depth to their music – and their latest offering, Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin only serves to provide yet more evidence of this. I’ve spent the weekend listening to this album – and the more I listen, the more infectious it becomes. Broken Hymns sweeps you up into a hectic humdrum of banjo, fiddle, guitar and manic percussion, with distorted vocals (such as Legs To Sin and Ratscars), and then back down into slow ballads with rip-roaring choruses (Mountain Shifts or Angeline), leaving you breathless, slightly dizzy, and feeling a little bit peculiar inside. In a good way. The lyrics are pretty meaningful to, for example, in Crawl Through Snow, singer Greg Jamie laments:

‘Our bodies splayed out before hateful eyeglasses,
I got more than I deserve,
Running away through the worst taste of blood
Helpless,
Facing the wrath of the herd.
Finding that my body has decayed, swinging my weak arms in the snow’

Pretty fierce stuff if I may say so. Map that onto an enquiring fiddle, supported by the ever-present banjo guitar and drums, it’s neat as hell. Don’t, however, think that it’s all misery and gloom. The music itself is enough to make you want to move your body in a slightly strange rhythmical fashion. For this is an album with attitude. And this is clearly evident in songs such as On An Aching Sea where they’ve recreated drummer David Rogers-Berry’s penchant for adding scrap-metal to his drum-kit – finding everything they could after a hunting mission in Brooklyn, motorcycle chains, bottles, you name it! Which brings us to the closing track – Lean-To – a frenetic giddy up barn-dance of a song, with Jamie singing ‘I’m going to leave here, I’m going to leave her, I’m going to leave you when morning comes, rah dah dah dah dah.’ It’s excellent.

There’s a real feeling, when listening to Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin that you are there in the front row of one of their live performances. This is an album which makes you want to tap your feet. It is an album that makes you want to ooo-aaarr like a dungaree-wearing pirate. And more importantly of all, it’s an album which offers you something quite different to the insipid music we currently hear on mainstream radio stations. I’ll be honest – it’s fairly hard to pinpoint the style of O’Death’s music as such – but it’s clear that if you like gypsy punk rock folk bluegrass blues, with a dash of Tabasco and extra chilli on the side, then this is the album for you. If you have no idea what gypsy punk rock folk bluegrass blues sounds like – then you can’t go far wrong with starting here (Kemado, 2008).