When New York outfit o’death released Outside, the band’s 2011 record, it made for the kind of record one would consider more mature than its predecessors, more refined. But that kind of logic, the kind we apply when people slow the tempo, turn down the volume, and up the refinement of recording (all things done on Outside) implies that edgy and mature are mutally exclusive terms. But from its wide debut, Head Home, to now, o’death has long been a band with an old soul, one far more world-weary and mature than its howling songs might initially let on.
And so as o’death refined its sound on Outside, the band didn’t sharpen what came before but rather offered yet another folk tangent to explore. Since then, though, lead singer Greg Jamie has relocated to Maine, which forced the band to operate out of new environs. The group’s new album, Out of Hands We Go, was recorded by Caleb Mulkerin, a guy inextricably linked to Maine’s music scene through acts like Cerberus Shoal and Fire on Fire. It’s an album that lacks the overdubs and polish of Outside, but it isn’t a return to some past sound for the band so much as it’s another scrappy deviation for a band that, four albums in, has made inconsistency and exploration the only consistencies of its sound.
These songs are delivered with brittle intimacy. Opener “Herd” sets the focus of the album, building around Jamie’s guitar and vocals, both so high in the mix you can hear them echo out into the recording space. The band joins in, with shuffling percussion and intricate weavings of string and banjo. Like this song “Wrong Time” front-porch-stomps along carving out similar spaces only to fill them later. Some of these songs scuff up Jamie’s vocals with a slight, organic distortion, so they almost feel like long-lost broadcasts. Other moments, especially the propulsive hum of “Apple Moon”, feel clarion clear and lean in their execution. Short tracks like “Go and Play With Your Dead Horses” sound low and distant, as if the band is in one corner of a warehouse and the microphones that capture them in another. As the album weaves from spare to full, from buzzing to humming, from intimate to distanced, it becomes clear this isn’t — despite its faint hiss — a recording about fidelity, but rather about both the band’s and the listener’s relationship to the sound, the distance both temporal and emotional that can be manipulated or accentuated in even the most Spartan recording set-ups.
This idea of connection, or lack there of, in the recording spills into the songs themselves. The band dances around the worry they’ve named themselves after for sure, but this is an album also about the worries before death. It’s an album about connection writ large. If it hints at a romantic focus, the implication of these stories ripple out much further than mere coupledome. Bodies and the earth and emotions all seem to carry a similar weight in Out of Hands We Go. On “Apple Moon”, Jamie wonders “Why does time make me old?” as if it is a pumice stone, a physical thing that grinds us down. Elsewhere bodies are often aligned with, or mentioned in concert with, wood. That wood is usually about to go up in flames. “I’m longing to hide her in the warm wooden fire wood,” Jamie warbles out on closer “Reprise”. People are sparks for each other. They can keep us warm (“I’m longing to get through the storm,” Jamie continues that line) or they can burn us down.
The loss and heartache here feels similarly elemental. It’s a thing held and shaped. It’s a thing people keep stumbling on “Wait for Fire”. It’s a weight on the back of the exhausted thump of “We Had a Vision”. Out of Hands We Go, though, isn’t all about the burden. It may give it heft, but the songs are remarkably resilient things. Driven by Jamie’s gentle range, his careful lyrics, and the band’s intricate, spacious arrangements, these songs push against the walls they create. They sift through the ash of dying fires for embers still burning, embers that can light anew. This is an album that is barbed at the edges, tough to hold in spots, but also warm and inviting at its bittersweet center. It’s an album of hard-won emotions and the kind of sinewy, scrappy, ever-shifting music that so perfectly represents the complexities of loss and heartache and yet frames them in a faint, bittersweet, persistent light.