Like a lot of traditional folk songs, the origins of "Oh Death" are somewhat nebulous. It may have been written by Madison County preacher Lloyd Chandler around 1916, but some cite it as yet another early British folk song (also known as "Conversations With Death") ported over to Appalachia. The tune has been recorded by the likes of Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, and, most famously, the Stanley Brothers and later Ralph Stanley himself. It's on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and somewhat ahead of the curve, Camper Van Beethoven covered it, too. But where did the song really begin? No one knows.
The origins of the band O'Death are a lot less mysterious. They come from New York, among the latest of a long line of traditionalists who look to old-time music as a place to hang their contemporary quirks. They enlist fiddles and banjos to cover the Pixies, sing about murder and mournful mayhem, and add just enough punk energy to convince the cool kids it's OK to listen to mountain music. It's like rural Appalachia, were hillbillies to exchange moonshine for meth.
Which they probably have, of course, but that doesn't make this sort of bastardization any easier to take. Affectation is the name of the game on O'Death's third album, Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin. The disc infuses folk with frenetic intensity, but it's all so over the top that it's hard to take it as anything more than a distraction, like an annoying buzz or a particularly scratchy pair of wool socks.
In its defense, however, that's pretty much par for this style-straddling subgenre, which, like ska-punk for example, takes an old-school template and makes it so overblown it practically pops like a balloon. Certainly Greg Jamie, who sings like a Depression-era carnival barker shouting through a megaphone straight into your ear, must realize his pinched, adenoidal style precludes much resonance and pushes the music further toward camp. The rhythm section, too, which juggles junkyard percussion with the hallmark polka beat of hardcore, is so far from subtle that it (literally) pounds out whatever nuance songs such as "Vacant Moan" or "Grey Sun" might possess.
Toss in some de rigueur Eastern European "gypsy" nods, and what you're left with is a band hedging its bets by opting for more, more, more rather than relenting to let a little breathing room into the music. The group downshifts a bit with the instrumental "Leininger", but the respite is brief. Even "Angeline" or "Home", both of which begin relatively restrained, can't resist going all spazzy, and in each case one can't help but recall bands such as the Meat Puppets, or even Camper Van, who did this stuff much better.
At their best, those bands were both subtle and smart. O'Death, on the other hand, deal almost entirely in broad strokes, which would be more acceptable were the bluster backed up by a stronger or more diverse set of songs, rather than a litany of murder ballad tropes and Americana clichés, magnified and distorted to such a degree that you're left cowed into exhausted submission. That might work on stage, where you can see the sweat flying off the band and get caught up in the excitement, but blasting from speakers it leans a little too close to punishment for comfort.
