CD Review: O'Death "Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin"

Characterized by apocalyptic themes conceptually opposite to the lightly amorous motifs favored by much of contemporary music, thoughtfully alternative performers preoccupied with human mortality have largely divided themselves across the severely contemplative, exemplified by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Nick Cave, and the politically hardcore, like Oakland's own Neurosis. Yet O'Death, similarly addressing the morose, offer still another interpretation of impending doom in all its forms with Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin, wryly celebrating life's inevitable conclusion like Edgar Allen Poe fronting a jug band. If representatives of all three styles were present at a hypothetical end of the world party, those from the first would be recording samples of eulogies and emergency broadcasts while members of the second constructed satirical effigies, leaving O'Death to share morbid limericks over the rest of the Jameson and Newcastle.

The band's rowdy character should not imply any lack of analytic rigor related to substantive acoustic and lyrical content, however, and a contained penchant for poetic abstraction distinguishes the darkly narrative song compositions. Though songwriting that wears its weird on its sleeve is not necessarily rare, O'Death create a distinct and consistent world for their songs through the subtle repetition of central figurative images. The act of breathing is used as a potential double metaphor during the second track, "Fire on Peshtigo," for example, when the song's narrator recalls "stepping on the neighbor that I once had seen as friend / alone / breathless air / ... / lake on fire / land too." Here, the lack of breath in the air may mean not only that no one, at least living, remains to fulfill such a motion, but also, due to the surrounding fire, that literally no air is left to breathe. Breathing is then mentioned by the internal narrator again on "Home," with the titular location, more likely a grave than summer cottage, being completely "the air I breathe." By the time the entire band is chanting "I breathe the fire / while the city burns / raise my glass higher / this is what I yearn for" on the closer "Lean-To," the seemingly boozing album has coherently developed its initial premises to festively deviant new ends.

More examples of sustained symbolism are prevalent across the fourteen tracks, many probably hidden in some of the the songs' more carousingly choral lines, and these grim conceptual structures do risk causing eventual listener claustrophobia. Still, the group manages to mostly avoid the effect, in part as a result of the songs' paradoxically thumping rhythms and strangely joyous attitude. Prominent fiddle and supporting banjo complete the blues and waltz arrangements, and the energy evident at the group's live shows is communicated effectively on the recording. Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin presents O'Death as capable leaders of their unique band of belligerent anti-prophets. The only question left for a group so concerned with fatal conclusions, then, is what next?

9/10

Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin is available at Amazon and the iTunes store.

Previous MCMB Coverage:
O'Death @ Bottom of the Hill, 11/21
"Lowtide" on Weekend Picks #8