This is a recommendation from the ever-reliable Campfires & Battlefields, and a fine one it is too. We’ve finally got him blogging himself now, so if you want to see what he has to contribute when he doesn’t have someone else’s hard work to make sarcastic comments about, go to his first ever post (complete with Hot Babe Action!), and his second, on the new collaborative blog effort Fun & Heartbreak, to which I will also be making the odd contribution.

This lot are a New York bunch who in way remind me of The Boggs, one of the first of the real folk revival groups back in the early noughties. There’s also plenty of the rattle and stomp of The Builders & the Butchers and there’s something of the Ice Cream Socialists in the vocal screech at times. It’s American folk music, but with more clattering drive than virtually the entire rest of the genre, at times a little like a snowball that is being pushed down a hill and is just starting to get slightly out of control.

As an album, it doesn’t always at all times do it for me, I must confess, but then neither did The Boggs. I couldn’t explain to you exactly why. The relentless banjo, sawing fiddle and barking vocals are exactly what I tend to love but I’m only about three-quarters there with these gentlemen. Maybe there are times when all the barking and stamping gets a little too much, because they do change the pace just enough, and it’s welcome whenever they do.  By and large though this is a terrific record which I would certainly recommend.

If you like your folk, but you like it with a pretty significant pair of cojones, then this is the album for you.

O’Death – Down to Rest
O’Death – O Lee O

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