Indie quartet oso oso (yes, lower case) released “Life Till Bones”, the band’s fifth album, on the heels of their last, “Sore Thumb”, recorded after the death of guitarist Tavish Maloney at age 24. Maloney was not only a cousin but best friends with bandleader and songwriter Jade Lilitri. Besides having the band in common, the two shared the good and the bad of growing up together in Long Beach, an oceanfront city a short rail ride from Queens, NY. The cause of Maloney’s death was undisclosed.
Football season is in the autumn air, a remembrance of how the two friends liked to play video games and bet parlays on NFL teams. “When we were making “Sore Thumb”, Lilitri recalled, “there was an old video game store down the block. They had the 2004 NCAA basketball, and there was a mascot setting where the college teams’ mascots play each other. We would just put that on the computer, sim it, and then we’d bet 10 bucks on it. That was pretty fun”.
As Lilitri told more stories about his cousin, you could hear his dog Boogie in the background. Apparently, the pooch is somewhat of a critic. The song ‘Dog Without Its Bark’ begins with distorted, garage rock guitars that evoke ’90s alt-rock. “The chorus for that song originated because while I was writing it, and singing the chorus, “I can’t give you love all of my life”, Boogie got upset and started whimpering. It’s probably because I’m making that weird noise with my voice to tease him. He is not a fan of the band’s music“.
oso oso has carved out a place for themselves among those acts that can revel in their musical oddness while somehow sounding graceful and straightforward. ‘Stoke’ is a song with a melody that oozes and crawls like a body stuck to hot blacktop, sounding as humid as it does tranquil, where the lines between life and death and the barriers of reality and hallucinations are equally blurred. “That had a nice rhythmic guitar feel: “I’m still coughing up smoke from the flame that you keep stoked”. It’s about when Tavish passed away”. Lilitri had moved to Pennsylvania, living in the woods and dealing with grief and loss. “The apartment that I had before started leaking mushrooms from the wall, actual fungus”.
It’s not as if Lilitri had stuck a pin in a map and it landed on Luzerne County, PA. He had friends out there, and music was getting harder to make in a place with painful memories. “It felt like any success I was having musically was just a lateral move”, he maintained, “I knew I wouldn’t be able to get out of the cycle that I was in, where I had to keep working, saving up to go out on tour. And I still had to live at my parents’ house, so I really wanted to move out and be able to make the littlest successes in music seem worth it. Doing it as a career was viable if I lived in Pennsylvania and was paying my own rent.”
How in the world did he manage to get around without a car, though, in a rural area? “I don’t know. It was tough,” he said, remembering sore legs from riding a bike. “The job that I had when I moved there, it was within walking distance, so I bought a bike for $25 that made getting around a little easier”.
At one point, however, there was a car, and perhaps the song ‘Country Club’ is an apologetic offering to his girlfriend about said car. “Let me give you the fictionalized account first”, Lillitri said a little sheepishly. “Let’s say it’s about a couple. They are at a country club, and the guy gets hammered, does a bunch of cocaine, and then steals his girlfriend’s car. Then he hits a little kid’s dog, and they get kicked out of the country club. I think it came from watching “The Wolf of Wall Street”, where there is a scene when DiCaprio’s character is leaving a country club all on Qualys and he destroys his Lamborghini. The real story is that I hit a bear in Pennsylvania with my girlfriend’s car, and she couldn’t use it for a month. Basically, I felt like a piece of shit both for hitting the bear and leaving her without wheels”.
“Life Till Bones” begins with the very good and dashingly percussive ‘Many Ways’. It reflects the mortality and sorrow that weave throughout the entire album. Of course, there is the album’s title and the bones on the cover to drive home the point. “The whole idea of the album is how in that song it starts off with saying life is a gun“, Lilitri revealed. “You could take that any way you want to, but to me it’s the idea that you are kind of stripped of choice more than you think. You are the bullet; you get shot out, and then you’re kinetically traveling. If you bounce off something, you’re pushed in that direction. You don’t get to choose those directions necessarily. And if you’re willing to accept that you don’t have any control, the only choice left is how you want to live your life. “Life Till Bones” has a lot of longing and heartbreak, but it’s also a commitment to riding the wave and doing it more enthusiastically than just going with the flow, if that makes sense.”
‘Other People’s Stories’ is a go with the flow kind of song. “Out of all the songs on the album,” Lilitri enthused, “it’s probably the one that’s the furthest from getting it right, execution wise. It was done off the cuff, but I really love it. I think if somebody wanted to try and think they were getting to know me through a song, that’s the one.” One that oso oso nailed is ‘That’s What Time Does’, an absurdly catchy song, but on the melancholy side. “We wanted to get that four on the floor beat, just shuffling through, trying to notice if the drums could do anything special. We slowed it down, sped it up a couple times. I played the chord progression on the acoustic guitar, and then we had Jordan Krimston go back to the drums and play that kind of ‘stoppy’ beat. I wrote the lyrics and everything flowed from there”.
The band is at its best when they decide to crank up their amps and dive headfirst into a riff. Lilitri’s periodic embodiment of rock ‘n’ roll spirit has yielded some great tracks, namely ‘Computer Exploder’ from their 2021 album “Sore Thumb”. The energy in that opening guitar line is truly magnificent. ‘Describe You’ swings the pendulum back to a full-throttle, alt-rock romp. The song revolves around Tavish Maloney’s acute talent for creating captivating yet simple melodies within every fuzzed-out note he plays. The riff is totally Jimmy Page-coded, with all the heaviness and groove. ‘Fly on the Wall’ is just begging to be played live.
“There was a thinking like, oh, when we play these live, we want these to be songs that an audience is excited to hear and wants to dance to”, Lilitri put forth. “Getting on to the fifth album, you start to worry. You don’t want your shows to become where people just want to hear old songs, so that’s the main factor behind pushing the newer material. You get to the point, like when the band was called osoosooso, that those songs aren’t coming back”.
Lilitri is very proud of this latest record, even though there are spots he wouldn’t mind updating. “The second a record is released,” he complained, “I think you instantly know what’s wrong with it, and also what’s right with it. Once out in the world, the light is shining brightly on what you’ve made. I’ll say this in a good way: This record has taken the longest time for me to see its faults. In other words, if this was the last record I’ll ever make, I’d feel pretty good about it”.
Tom Petty remarked when he made “Wildflowers” that he felt he had hit the point of pure musical clarity. That was a pure record for him. Was that what Lilitri was getting at with “Life Till Bones?” Lilitri thought for a few moments, then said: “It’s funny. I was listening to that Petty album the other week, just the first four-song run. That’s crazy good. He probably didn’t need any validation from critics, and neither do I, which is a good feeling to have. There are songs on it I would listen to even if I hadn’t done them”.
Still, the real identity of oso oso comes from the community of the band members. It’s in the way that their personalities balance each other out: country twang alongside eerie folk, electric riff-rock next to delicate acoustic guitar. The memory of Tavish Maloney is still a part of what they do. It’s the sounds of their friendships baked into the songs: natural, comfortable, and communal coexistence.
It has been written elsewhere that Lilitri was the controlling type, and he allows as to maybe there once was merit to that, but things change over the course of five albums. “I think I’ve given up a lot of that control”, Lilitri offered. “This is the first record we’ve made where we actually own the rights, so we’ll be able to see money from it, and everyone in the band will get royalties. Jordan, on the drums, is integral, and there are some writing credits for him. Eddy Rodriguez has been down to play with anything I’ve thrown at him, and he deserves a piece”.
He describes the tightness they feel as a group, going back to when Maloney was alive and spiking it on guitar. It was during their first headlining tour in London. “The show was sold out”, Lilitri remembered fondly, “and we were just so stoked, playing over there, and people knew our songs. I just remember looking over at my cousin playing the guitar solo on the last song, and everyone was doing the fire fingers thing over him. That’s what comes to mind and makes me grateful for the experiences we’ve had.”
