Deep in Greenpoint, Brooklyn--amid crumbling warehouses, ancient Polish bread factories, punk rock dives and luxury high rises--O'death is recording an album. Much like the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the album is a mish-mosh of various eras, including some widely thought to be long gone. But unlike in Greenpoint, the eras on this album coexist peacefully, in so far as a crazy country-punk album can be peaceful. O’death is also much more fun to dance to than Greenpoint, and has 100% fewer underground oil spills, unless you count the metaphorical ones in their hearts. And those (probably) won’t give you cancer.

I make the trip up to Greenpoint to meet the band at their studio, and they sit down to talk over Yeunglings at the end of the first day of a grueling recording schedule. Though everyone is exhausted, they have a lot to say, and their excitement over what they are creating is palpable. A six-piece, self-described “gothic/country/punk” band, O’death is tricky to categorize. Their name might conjure up the tongue-in-cheek spookiness of Bauhaus, or, further down the food chain, their questionable '90s-era progeny which you might hear blaring from a Hot Topic on the way from Yankee Candle to Cinnabon. But we must not forget that before Manson or Murphy there was Faulker, and more importantly, people who had to eat possums to survive. The Southern Gothic aesthetic loomed large in Appalachian folk music long before it was a named, self-conscious idea; it was simply life, in all its messy, painful, comic, tragic glory. It’s that same dark spirit that inspires these six New Yorkers to make music that is both a tribute to the greats of blues and bluegrass like Doc Boggs and Charlie Patton, and a brand new thing in the world.

“The thing that struck me about this music,” says drummer David Rogers-Berry, “was that this is punk rock. It’s so aggressive raw and dirty, it’s really like life and death, heavy shit.”

Though he’s speaking metaphorically, he makes it literal by providing the loud, fast percussion that helps transform the band’s raucous live shows into something decidedly modern. David is a madman on stage; with gas cans, chains, and lots of elbow grease, he goes a long way towards fulfilling the band’s promise of punk rock.

Besides kicking ass through sheer decibel level, their shows embody punk ideals by being accessible to as many listeners as possible. Both folk/roots music and punk rock have been described as “the music of the people,” folk making this explicit in its very name, so it makes sense that the two would mesh well in sound and spirit. Despite the band’s rising popularity and bookings at large venues like the Bowery Ballroom, they favor house parties where “the people just want to sweat and jump around and get in some dingy basement and have a good time.” And lately, it seems like the balance of shoegazing cool kids and crazed music fans has been tipping towards the latter.

Case in point: the last O’death show I attended was at an unheated punk house in a not-yet-gentrified section of Bushwick and managed to draw well-dressed indie rockers, unwashed bike punks, bespectacled geeks, a few lonely goths, and some people whose retro outfits appeared to be some sort of attempt at living in the 1920s (do they come up with new subcultures while I’m sleeping? I will call them “dapper-core”). There was nary a fan too cool to rock out at least a little, and when the power went out, the rhythm section didn’t stop, but percussed maniacally to chants of “e-lec-tricity!” until it came back on.

The ability to bring so many types together in a place as cliquish as Brooklyn strikes me as remarkable, but the band sees it as a natural byproduct of the way they operate. “We’ve never really cared about genre or anything as specific as that,” bassist Jesse Newman shrugs. “People like it for what it is, so we appeal to a bunch of different ideas from a bunch of different subcultures.”

One idea that interests many of these groups is what singer Greg Jamie describes as “little p politics…the implicit politics of life.” Through myth and character, he explains, he explores his own psyche and how humans relate to the world. For example, the foot-stomper “Lean-to” is on its surface a song about "rejecting society" and living in a lean-to in the woods, something most of us Starbucks-drinking, iTunes-downloading city folk have never done. But in a broader sense, Greg says, it’s about saying, “I am so sick of all this shit,” even if you only say it to yourself. What balding, midtown middle manager has not occasionally looked out the window and wondered with a sigh of existential ennui what it would be like to wander into the woods, live off nature’s bounty and grow a gnarly beard? Maybe not all of them, but forgetting for a second that most of us would probably be eaten by bears, it’s a fantasy to which many can relate.

All of this fantastical imagining has drawn predictable fire from critics quick to dismiss anything that draws too much attention to itself via "excessive" sincerity or suspected subcultural affiliation. Even in positive reviews, it is almost as if the critics are fighting some weird schizophrenic battle between the part of them that’s indoctrinated to hate anything that’s not in their canon of safe sounds, and the part that feels things viscerally, the part that makes them need to hear music in the first place. For example, Pitchforkian William Bowers wrote of their last album, Head Home that, “The more genial tracks…are lived-in and powerful enough to help the listener forgive the anachronisms.” The whole review is an exercise in backhanded compliments.

David is mildly annoyed by this prevalent safety-seeking impulse: “Right now in the indie rock scene it’s very acceptable to sound exactly like your influences,” he says, “and audiences are eating it up, too. It’s like ‘Oh, I love Paul Simon’s Graceland, so Vampire Weekend is right up my alley.’” “People are also strongly encouraged to write very boring melodies,” observes multi-instrumentalist Gabe Darling, “it’s like, if you put too many really interesting rhythms into a vocal melody it gets out of style.” Singer Greg Jamie’s demented screech certainly falls into that category. “You’re really exposing yourself,” he admits of committing fully to a vocal part. I decide that most of these doctrinaire critics were probably picked on as children.

Luckily for O’death, the eclectic groups of people who flail about madly at their shows don’t care what the critics think, or at least what they think about O’death. Like many bands who play the New York underground circuit, they are too weird to really be categorized as anything other than “interesting,” and their colleagues are not the retro-costumed, spot-on stylized rockabilly groups, but fellow oddballs like The Dirty Projectors and Aa. “Most of the bands are a lot of the same bullshit,” David says, “but it so happens that maybe a third of them are really pushing themselves and doing different things.”

This band is pushing itself in more ways than one. They are slated to finish recording their new album in less than two weeks, then they head down to Austin to play an insane number of showcases at South by Southwest, often three a day. After that, they’re tearing around the country until the end of April, bringing their hard-hitting sing-along hootenannies to the masses. This breakneck triathlon will no doubt take a lot out of them, but as a band that lives for playing live, they’ll be in their element. “Music has become a spiritual outlet for us,” David says, “a chance to connect with people, something transcendent.” Get ready to join the congregation, America.



The band's tour schedule can be viewed here.