Tommy and The Ohs ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸
Nashville based producer Thomas Oliverio has long lived at the confluence of American roots music & the avant-garde. Most notably known as founder of the influential group Bawn in the Mash, Tommy and The Ohs launched in 2013 with the release of Living in the Swamp, recorded live to tape at RCA Studio A. His debut album- the long awaited psychedelic opus Mariposa Gold, will be released March 18, 2022.
LINKS:
RELEASES
Mariposa Gold
Perpetual Doom is proud to present the long-awaited full-length from Tommy and The Ohs: Mariposa Gold. Ohs’ mastermind Thomas Oliverio has worked alongside some of the biggest names in music today—but with Mariposa Gold, he takes a sharp turn into the psychedelic reaches of American roots music and the avant-garde. The result is a wild trip through a lavish soundscape, a California of fantasy and heartbreak, where genres and traditions bleed together in “the big surreal.”
Guided by Oliverio’s fine-tuned sense of production and melody, Mariposa Gold is lush with arrangements that strive toward new and surprising dimensions. These songs sway like hummable country weepers sent through the looking glass, joining sheer virtuosity, worthy of the best session players, to a distinct experimental sensibility shaped by bluegrass, country, and psychedelia.
Album opener “Bombshell” propels forward to surf guitar and a shivering tambourine. The song has the urgency of a quest, adding layers of organ and a driving backbeat, building as Oliverio’s sings of a “flame in the brain.” Is it a breakdown? The beginning of a love affair? On this side of the golden coast, there might not be any difference. It is a fitting opening statement for an album packed dense with explosive material.
That roiling tension deepens on “Wine Country Girl,” where shadows hang over the vineyards and nothing is quite itself. The lyrics speak of sunshine, but the rattling percussion and a spitfire mandolin solo evoke a more sinister scene: “It’s the big surreal, the golden coast, like a Wild West shootout between two ghosts,” Oliverio sings. “Down 41 and up 46, off the 1 in Harmony is where I got hitched to you, wine country girl.”
“Mama Allcaps” spins the timeless tale of a love gone wrong into a tense and bitter blues. Tracked live, Oliverio and his band unleash a five-minute hornet’s nest of fiddle, organ, and guitar—all fitting accompaniment for this scene of down and dirty betrayal: “There goes Mama Allcaps on her night out. Second hand smoke with her cellphone off.” We don’t need to know where she’s headed to know it’s nowhere good. Somewhere in the smoke the anger burns hot, but here Oliverio hammers it into an encore-ready centerpiece track.
Mariposa Gold is at once a raucous, genre-defying road trip and a deeply personal statement.
Press:
Release Date: Cassette and Digital on March 18, 2022
Vinyl on July 11, 2022
Purchase from Bandcamp
VIDEOS
