Oso Oso – life till bones
Jade Lilitri, the voice and mind behind Long Beach, New York’s Oso Oso, is not one for sprawl. His now five-album discography is about as tight an exercise in hooky, emo songwriter as one could muster. Oso Oso longest album to date, 2022’s Sore Thumb, runs through 12 songs in a whopping 37 minutes, never lingering a second past its welcome. And yet, there’s a precariousness at the heart of their latest, life till bones, an instability that feels held together by duct tape and bobby pins, a frailty beneath the sheen. Nowhere is this more exposed than “seesaw,” a song that will initially satisfy those nostalgic for Lilitri’s earliest days as Oso Oso. Behind an acoustic guitar and a gentle plink of a piano, Lilitri plainly diagnoses the tension rending the album in two; “In the seesaw I saw a balance in me, now the balance is gone I don’t know what I see.”
This is, more than anything, the moment when content and context intertwine most plainly, revealing one of the motivating factors driving life till bones. Oso Oso’s last record, Sore Thumb was one steeped in personal tragedy, released amidst the sudden death of Lilitri’s cousin and creative partner Tavish Maloney. Maloney’s touch was all over sore thumb, an album that Lilitri decided to release as-is after his death despite the songs being nominally unfinished, an exercise in grief and absolution. Of course, that means nothing Lilitri sings about on Sore Thumb is directly about that grief, even though the album is, for him certainly, inextricably linked to loss. And while it’s certainly not as if the entirety of life till bones is focused squarely on such sorrow, its force is felt. Opener “Many Ways” is just the kind of fractured, murky intro you might expect of someone dipping a toe back into turbulent waters. “I love you but life is a gun,” Lilitri sings, introducing a theme that runs through life till bones, the gun a clear signifier for unpredictable destruction.
There has always been a power-pop sensibility lurking beneath the surface of even Oso Oso’s punkiest leanings. Here, Lililtri embraces that instinct even further, at times in direct opposition to the subject matter, a trick that works even when the narrative becomes opaque. Life till bones’ first side is littered with big wailing choruses and hooks upon hooks, songs like “the country club” and “that’s what the time does” that feel wonderfully familiar after a single listen. And yet they are never quite as rosy as they might seem, best exemplified by album single “all of my love,” a song in which the gun is now turned on Lilitri and even among jovial, radio-friendly handclaps, admissions of fragility rain down: “The reasons I wake up are the same that I can’t breathe.”
For an artist for whom memorable lines and infectious riffs seem second nature, it’s the interiority that lodges these songs so deep. There may not be a lot of experimentation but it’s the relative simplicity that allows for such winsome intricacies to rise to the surface. Lilitri might not, as he sings on “seesaw,” see the balance within himself, but hearing the way he resolves that tension throughout life till bones makes for one of the most engaging records of the year.
Label: Yunahon Entertainment LLC
Year: 2024
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Oso Oso : life till bones
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