Finally, someone has found a unique angle for the execution of tired "Southern" tropes: be from New York! What a genius plan this sextet has concocted, to bring their hoedown-core to the nation's music-blog-and-press-hub so that typists and hypists don't have to (sigh) seek them out in the cultural landfill that is (yawn) non-New-York America, and then the band can bask in the boring language of this genre's typical, lazy, ghetto-izing reception: "haunted," "Appalachian," "swamp," "mountain," etc. City slickers might be surprised by how unswampy most mountains are, and vice versa. Anyway, bits of the o'death boys' affected vocals and influence-recycling barely escape being lampoonable as striving to embody Clap Y'alls Hands Say Yeehaw.
At the risk of seconding the provincialism of Pace picante sauce commercials, the group does contain one actual Southerner, the manically talented drummer David Rogers-Berry, who is from my home state, the often (justifiably) maligned South Carolina. (The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle is fond of saying "North, by god, Carolina," and Stephen Malkmus repeatedly used Charleston gigs as opportunities to mock "South Carolina rock history.") But the Palmetto State has contributed respectably to "cool" culture lately, what with the rise of tunesmiths Band Of Horses and Iron & Wine, as well as comedians Stephen Colbert and Aziz Ansari. Rogers-Berry's geography-cred isn't enough to save Head Home's title from occasionally seeming as dishonest as fast food chain Hardees' "come home" (to a franchise?) campaign.
Too many of these songs seem so hurriedly basted in campy rascality that you might imagine the Cramps and Wes Craven staging a musical called The Hillbillies Have Eyes, or Gremlins having taken over the Grand Ole Opry, or, I don't know, Little Shop Of Horrors redone with a giant bilious honeysuckle. The hell-raising, fiddle-driven "All The World" rules supreme over the rest of the album's spooky material, and it tellingly arrives during the more settled second half. No one's demanding that hootenannies be pokerfaced, but when o'death reins in the mugging, they can resonate as powerfully as recent outsourced-Southernness acts such as Portland's Horse Feathers, Seattle's the Lights, Brooklyn's the Boggs, and so forth. Maybe o'death's yowl is trying to tell Frank Black that his current down-home phase could use a pinch of Black Francis; "Nimrod's Son" is a staple of this band's reputedly awesome live show.
The more genial tracks such as "Travelin Man", "Jesus Look Down", and "Gas Can Row" are lived-in and powerful enough to help the listener forgive the anachronisms, best symbolized by the coalminer photos on the band's MySpace page. It's not o'death's fault that the stunning existential spiritual "O Death" got used during the weak Mel Brooksian Klan-rally scene in O Brother Where Art Thou, or that they're basically re-enacting incidental music for a mode of reckoning that is mostly gone. (As a little girl, my milltown-bred mother used to tie junebugs to each of her fingers and marvel at them; now her late adulthood leisure-time is spent clutching a remote control during autopsy-porn on CBS.) O'death wear their throwback jerseys well when their lyrics aren't mired in Bible-belt Mad Libs, and their passion for what they're doing-- as well as their cathartic energy-- is undeniable. One would have to outright hate the paranormal not to grant the stringy final minute of "Ground Stump" its cold chills, or be a neat freak to resist the use of what sounds like kicked broken bottles as percussion on "Rickety Fence Teeth."
