O'Death are a New York City-based quintet playing scrappy, Americana-seeped folk songs-- they can be menacing and frantic, or odd and quiet-- in the slapdash spirit of Tom Waits. For O'Death, at least, it's the New York bit that tends to trip people up: It's easy to feel distrustful of (real or imagined) hipster mobs, and to feel proprietary about music as raw and unpretentious as the classic country and folk O'Death mine. And while these days every band that enlists a fiddler gets subjected to an Americana litmus test-- Are they southern? Are they poor? Are they really wearing overalls? Are the overalls real?-- the thing about folk music is that it's impossible to render inauthentic: Inclusiveness is its crux. Most bygone genres are too inextricably tied to their respective times and places to ever really be "revived," so what gets trotted out, instead, is an approximation of a feeling-- and hey, that's just art.
For O'Death, the feeling in question is urgency: They've always been revved-up and eager, but Outside, the band's third full-length, is also earnest and persuasive, a collection of intensely personal, intricately assembled folk songs. The best of these tracks plead for your attention: Opener "Bugs" is soft and heartbreaking ("I know that days don't come back, please believe in me," Greg Jamie sings, his voice high and plaintive), unfurling like a lost Elliott Smith track. It's a sentiment that's revived on the heavy, rhythmic "Pushing Out", which contains a line ("This year could last forever, this year could never start") instantly familiar to anyone who's ever had a long, cold, ennui-laden New Year's Day.
Most of O'Death's prior releases were about a kind of lunatic energy; Outside is more studied, and its references are broader (besides the Americana they typically pull in, there's plenty of world music at work here, from Balkan folk to Klezmer). The band's 2009 tour was interrupted when drummer David Rogers-Berry was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer. After a course of chemotherapy and a shoulder replacement, O'Death returned to play a triumphant set at the Newport Folk Festival the following summer, and that sense of redemption (and optimism) ultimately keeps Outside from ever feeling defeated. Songs that begin forebodingly resolve themselves ("Back of the Garden", "Ghost Head"); the sun rises again; the world is still big and full of sound.
Ultimately, O'Death's instrumentation (banjo, fiddle, ukulele) and name (it's taken from an ancient Appalachian dirge that's been reinterpreted by everyone from Ralph Stanley to Sam Amidon) can feel like something of an albatross. Sure, the band is rooted in American folk, but they're also adventurous listeners and composers, and Outside is unclassifiable in the same way records by northern contemporaries Beirut and Man Man are unclassifiable-- folk music, it turns out, is a broad and fluid thing.
