Brother, My Cup Is Empty

Naming your band after another artist’s song is, in fact, the equivalent of taking off your clothes in the town market and running around while shouting your adoration for the said artist. O Children know this. O Children embrace this with out any shame. O Children flaunt their love for Mr. Nicholas Edward Cave. Heavily breathing into their microphones, the four Londoners are never afraid of being pastiche. They wear their influences on their sleeves. Influences, for The Bad Seeds are not the only ones who helped shape the sound of O Children.

While vocalist Tobi O’Kandi does take a lot from Cave’s singing technique, he would also make an Andrew Eldritch. The heavy drums and deep voice shake you out of the state of lethargy as soon as the first notes of Malo hit your ears. A cavernous sound that circles around the mantra-like “If I lose you tonight, I’ll lose you forever” oozes Sisters Of Mercy.

But O Children might as well have named themselves “The Killing Moons”. Every step closer to the band’s heart reveals a deep love for the post-punk of Echo& The Bunnymen. When they look to Cave and Eldritch for pieces of advice, they are borderline claustrophobic. When they embrace the teachings of Ian McCulloch and co, they are like a brush that barely touches the canvas: Heels and Fault Line are playful and grand.

It wouldn’t be a review for a post-punk band, if Joy Division wouldn’t get mentioned. But here, on this recording, JD’s spirit is felt only to the extend where O Children’s atmospheric sound does feel like their take on the Manchurians heavy doze of melancholia like the case of Radio Waves. And the lyrics do give you the right to expect a band like The Wombats to write a song that goes “Let’s dance to O Children and celebrate the irony”.

If the melodies seem like a myriad of things put together, it would be safe to say O’Kandi could fill either Cave’s shoes or McCulloch’s. The man has the same tonality and way of pronouncing words as the two. Lyrically, he still has to learn but the morbidity and darkness of the likes of Murder Ballads and deep sadness of Ocean Rain are all there. It seems like it’s Cave himself crooning over the Echo-like drums of Fault Line: “Brother, stop sinning and listen to your mother when she cries”.

O Children are still young, all only 19 to 21, so no one should expect them to be firmly in the place where they could be entirely ‘their own voice’. But the haunting vocals, the hypnotic rhythm section that complements them every second of the album, the shy keyboards, the sometimes incredibly shoegaze-y guitars blend together to create an album that is just as exciting and addictive as the music of those who O Children take from.