O’Death @ Spaceland, 11/22: The Per-folked Storm

This past Saturday night I found myself at Spaceland as O’Death took the stage. If you haven’t heard the band before, they fit somewhere between the genres of jug band, folk, and pirate punk with an added splash of well-educated academic musicianship. Most of their songs are sea shanties and their drummer plays the chains as a legitimate percussive instrument. O’Death plays pirate music, but not Jack Sparrow pirate, more like that awesome pirate ship in the Goonies with all the skeletons and tons of jewels and treasure and shit.

This band definitely lived up to their reputation for putting on an energetic show; Bob Pyciore, the fiddle player, was jumping spastically around the stage like an epileptic Tim Burton character and David Rogers-Berry actually stood up a few times to throw a cymbal against his drum kit for an ear-splitting crash.

The thing that I liked the most about O’Death is that at first glance they look just like your typical basement punk band that you used to pay two bucks to see at the local rec center in high school, but then they start their set and they’re actually really fucking talented musicians. The other thing I really appreciated about the band is that front man Greg Jamie is so humble and polite. It’s pretty refreshing to not be totally demeaned by a singer when you’re just there to have a couple of beers and jam out to a few songs.
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