Head Home

Hey You Guys,

I'm Dr. Teeth. You may know me from my work with the Electric Mayhem, or perhaps my thriving Muppet-orthodontia practice. I'm the new pop culture guy here on the balcony. Expect me to use this space to vent my frustrations with and enthusiasms for the books, movies, TV shows, albums, and other random things over which I obsess. So if you're out there, wandering the blogosphere like a forlorn Jew, thirsting for a place where you can find high-minded dissections of all the pop cultural detritus with which you fill up the cold black void in your sad, lonely little life (you loser), you can have a home at From the Balcony.

Let's start off with an album you should buy. (Not steal; buy. Judging from their stage show, these guys are in dire need of funds with which to purchase shirts, low-calorie foodstuffs, and back-waxing kits.)

Hailing from the murkiest swamplands of Brooklyn, New York, the members of O'Death conjure up a brutal, humid hoedown on their latest album "Head Home." The opener "Lay Me Down to Rest," an irresistibly ramshackle shout-along, sets the haunted hillbilly tone that echoes through the record. Yes, O'Death is another band of college-educated New Yorkers attempting to summon gothic ghosts out of the weird old South. But no, unlike several of their hipster-country contemporaries, they don't suffer from musical carpetbagging.

Mixing a great deal of hoot with a pungent dash of nanny, these guys create their own passionately threadbare musical universe, making similar gothic yowl-folk groups like Man Man and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah look half-hearted by comparison. They wear their influences on their sleeves -- singer Greg Jamie's high, wobbly voice recalls Tonight's the Night-era Neil Young, while the gutbucket bass thump and general kitchen-sink groove are lifted directly from late-period Tom Waits -- but blend them into a heady concoction entirely their own. There's something relentless about the music -- the songs are hastily hammered together out of wagon wheels and rusty nails, driven forward by whip-crack fiddle sawing of Bob Pycior. They sound as though they might burst into flames or fall to pieces at any moment.

O'Death is also capable of restraint and loveliness, as in the melancholic opening of "Only Daughter," a song that eventually builds to a chaotic storm of thuds and strings. It's one of the few mistakes on the album -- a quiet and gorgeous song dressed up in apocalyptic pretentions it doesn't need or deserve. Listened to all at once, the album suffers from a somewhat wearying sameness -- more quiet and understatement would serve to highlight the cataclysmic barnburners and supply some much-needed tonal shifts. As scorching and enthralling an album as Head Home is, it sounds like a first try. You get the sense that the great O'Death masterpiece is still in the future -- a future that lies further and deeper in America's growling, cut-throat rural past.

Next time on "Doctor Teeth Yammers Semi-Coherently"... The Lost Finale: did it suck or rock?; a philosophical treatise on the hotness of Evangeline Lilly; and why it's all actually about the nation of Israel.