O'Death Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin Review 5x4n20

Say ''country'' to most UK music fans, and they'll probably think of some honey-voiced blonde sadly lamenting the loss of her man in a Texas bar, but - as their name suggests - O'Death have a messier, more bloody take on the genre. Fusing rootsy bluegrass with scrappy DIY punkiness, the New York quintet have built up a cult reputation for their chaotic live shows. This third album is an avowed attempt to finally capture that energy on record.

As such, it's a success, a breakneck paced collection of saloon singalongs and hysterical hoedowns that pummel the listener into submission. Even slower songs like Mountain Shifts, with its swaggering ''la la la la'' chorus, are filled with wrong-footing tempo shifts, while tunes such as Ratscars are brief, brisk and brutish, filled with grisly imagery like, ''I had a knife, I had no sheath/ Blood on the ground, blood in my teeth''.

Indeed, next to the furious energy on display, it's the macabre Americana of Greg Jamie's lyrics that stands out most. The feverish Fire On Peshtigo - about a horrifying fire that struck Wisconsin in 1871 – suggest Jamie has soaked himself in the same lurid American history as the novelist Cormac McCarthy. At its most demented, Broken Hymns, Limbs And Skin could be the soundtrack to Blood Meridian, McCarthy's apocalyptic, terrifying chronicle of whisky-fuelled slaughter in 1850s frontier America.

There are moments where Jamie's antique preoccupations and bug-eyed vocal style lapse towards hamminess, such as on the lurching, drunken On An Aching Sea or closer, Lean-To, which sounds a little too like the Bonanza theme for comfort. But for the most part, O'Death sound convincing and compelling, as on the bristling, hook-heavy Legs To Sin, or on Low Tide, which opens with the bass from London Calling before mutating into a fiddle-fuelled frenzy. Too oddball and vicious to be everyone's cup of moonshine, Broken Hymns, Limbs And Skin will intoxicate those with the stomach for such things.