Tommy and The Ohs ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸
Nashville based multimedia producer Thomas Oliverio has long lived at the confluence of American roots & 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, was released last year to worldwide critical acclaim. Tommy & The Ohs second full length album, 'Box Truck Boogie', will be released by Perpetual Doom on October 27, 2023, alongside the 10th anniversary edition of 'Living in the Swamp’
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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.
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Release Date: Cassette and Digital on March 18, 2022
Vinyl on July 11, 2022
Purchase from Bandcamp
RELEASES
Box Truck Boogie
Perpetual Doom is proud to present the new full-length album from Tommy and The Ohs: Box Truck Boogie. Turning inland from the psychedelic coastline of 2022’s Mariposa Gold, Thomas Oliverio heads homeward on this shimmying showcase of Alt-Country songwriting and arrangement. It is a record designed to sit comfortably next to the Ohs’ previous experiments while driving new life into well-known sounds, resulting in compositions that feel familiar as the heartland roadside, as refreshing as a highway breeze.
On Box Truck Boogie, Oliverio and his band pare down their sound to elegant roots playing and lyrics that pierce with the wisdom of experience. This time he draws on his own cross-country trips, navigating 13,000 miles across North America in a big rig he had to teach himself to drive- a simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating lesson in life on the road: weigh stations, border crossings, diesel, DEF, Sedona at sunrise. The spirit of that journey—and the FM tunes he picked up along the way—invests the album with a buoyant troubadour quality, full of homecomings and partings, lovings and leavings.
That kicks off with “I Don’t Know What I Was On (But Honey I’m Off It Now),” an opener that revels in boozy piano while speaking of sobering up and coming clean. The party builds to telecaster and fiddle trading solos in fine Ameripolitan fashion. “You said you wanted a change, you said you wanted to part,” Oliverio sings. “But honey all we need is a second start.” The invitation extends to listeners, too—this is a reunion we’re all intended to enjoy.
A ghostly melancholy floats through “So It Seems,” where gentle Spanish guitar and vivid strings serenade a love that is not quite lost. Oliverio speaks of a relationship gone wrong but not gone, in which “the rest is history, or so it seems.” It makes a perfect pairing with the casual sorrow that laces through his arrangement of Silver Jews’ “Candy Jail,” a rendition Oliverio describes as “me covering Zeb Zaitz covering David Berman.”
With a cinematic glimpse of various comings and goings, “Ciao, Bella” captures the heart of Box Truck Boogie. The gentle decay of a steel drum introduces a hypnotic meditation on loss: “When you wake up and know it’s time to go, you can’t take up pockets of silver and gold.” Still a glimmer of hope remains on the horizon, as Tommy and The Ohs reveal on the final rambunctious track: “Pig on a Train.” There Oliverio offers a bit of hard-earned insight, the kind only a lifetime of rodeos can afford you: “Sometimes its the light at the end of the tunnel,” he sings, “sometimes its the light of a train.”
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Paste Magazine - The 30 Best Country, Folk and Americana Albums of 2023
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Paste Magazine - Best New Album: "a staunchly wondrous collection of country tunes that arrive like a time capsule. "
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"Ran it a play and I must say; --- visualized some dancers dancing, like on a dancing floor. And the lights were down low and the dancers knew the score. That is; they really knew how to dance. I don't know about the jig, but the sky was pretty big. I heard a female in the mix, that is how I get my kicks. Love it or Leave it." - Michael Hurley
Release Date: Oct. 27, 2023
Purchase from Bandcamp or Official Store
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