And here comes another one from the department of better late than never… I think for a long time I was resistant to listening to O’Death because, well, from my brown girl New Yorker perspective “Appalachia Punk” seemed a little far flung. Well, this week is a time for changes and a week for realizing that we are all ready to stop thinking inside our little boxes. I bought a message t-shirt that says “Obama Mama”, I signed on to O’Death’s frenetic mixing of seemingly discordant genres. Times are a-changing. But really in the end, labels mean nothing. This twanging and yelling and somber tone really just throws me back to the good old Tom Waits days. And we liked them days. Three cheers to the Tie Fighter and his fantastic quinoa-making roommate for making me see the O’Death light.
The Black Hollies
Here’s a little something I’ve been playing on my radio show for the past few weeks. I really wish more bands did the neo-psychedelic sound. It’s a sound I’m quite fond of, a sound that I felt I found on my own when I was fourteen years old, old enough finally to ride my bike (uphill both ways!) to Camel Records or Music Market to dig through rows of records searching for The Three O’Clock albums that came out before Sixteen Tambourines, a record I heard in the back of a friend’s van heading south on Pacific Coast Highway on our way to a church dance in Newport Beach. And while The Black Hollies sound more like The Seeds than The Three O’Clock, I dig their way-back sound. As you can tell it takes me way back to when the Sixties were twenty years past, not forty.