O'Death - Head Home

There's a drunken rabble partying, fighting and crowing in my speakers. Do I hear the archaic irony of rockabilly crossbred with the brimstone soul of punk? That and a whole lot of inanity. O'Death have put the bellows to a bonfire of miscreant influences and are proceeding to stagger round the flames to the frantic sound of the banjo. The staccato, off-beat drums give way to riotous hoedowns filled with red-raw vocals and white-hot streaks of fiddle. The record dips and slows unnecessarily in the middle before recovering its half-swagger, half-stagger in Rickety Fence Teeth and levelling out with some straight-up story-telling hillbilly romps. The sluggish, forgettable ballads aside there is solid novel value in Head Home that'll suffer a good few listens. [Jamie Borthwick]