Oh No! Oh My!

The wide-eyed beckon, “what I can do, what I can do” resonates as the last line of Oh No! Oh My!’s new EP, Between the Devil and the Sea. Amid the sleigh-bell sounds and fingers, softly sliding fret-to-fret, as the spring-y disc valleys—these words articulate this blooming Austin, TX group’s aesthetic. The band’s name may have been incidental, but it makes perfect sense when given the facts of Oh No! Oh My!’s progression, from experimenting kids, to playing festivals and support gigs with indie rock luminaries like The Flaming Lips and Gnarls Barkley. Images that predominate the band’s artwork depict some of those themes: kids gazing out at dusk flying a “I don’t even know if people realize how young we really are”, multi-instrumentalist and band cofounder Daniel Hoxmeier says about how Oh No! Oh My! came to be. “This is nothing we ever expected to happen. We record all our music by ourselves, in a converted garage, having fun— sharing our music with friends and family. The single thing we ever did to promote the band ourselves was sending a demo of “Walk in the Park” to one of our favorite blogs, Music For Robots.”
The band, all a median age of nineteen, put together demos of songs they recorded and mixed themselves, and opportunities rolled along in multiplicity from there. Some of the songs from their demo were posted and lauded by subsequent influential blogs, like Gorilla Vs. Bear, You Ain’t No Picasso, I Guess I’m Floating, and the list goes on. When Pitchfork discovered the band online, they obtained a copy of what were then demos of the Oh No! Oh My! tunes and ran a review. This, along with the need to sell something at shows, prompted the band to sequence their demos and put together artwork and to call it an ‘album.’ They were soon approached by retail outlets such as Insound, iTunes, and CIMS stores and their ‘album’ incredibly sold over 10,000 copies through these three aforementioned outlets and touring alone, even charting as Insound’s #8 release in 2006. The band’s tenth show ever was Lollapalooza—and when their music wound up on the Macintosh of Steve Jobs, he hand picked the band’s “Walk in the Park” to accompany part of his Apple annual Key Note Presentation in San Francisco, January 2007. The kids in Oh No Oh My! started playing music when they were just fourteen years old, and all of them play at least three different instruments. Daniel (Guitars, Banjos, Accordions, Keys, Wurlitzers, Tambourines, Hand Claps, Percussion, Sampling, Programming) and Joel Calvin (Drums, Keys, Hand Claps, Sampler, Tambourines, Bells, Shakers) were best friends growing up; Greg Barkley (Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Banjos, Accordions, Rhodes, Wurlitzers, Keys, Hand Claps, Percussion) joined the boys after Daniel and Joel “stole Greg from his previous band”, and most recent addition, Tim Regan (Keys, Locks, Bolts, Wurlitzers, Rhodes, Syths, Guitars, Vocals), rounds out the band’s bubbly-folk-meets-indie-pop sound. The Between EP is a collection of previously unreleased songs. Although some are already live favorites, they are slight departures from how many know Oh No! Oh My!. On Between the Devil and the Sea, Oh No! Oh My!’s often described tongue-in-cheekiness isn’t as much apparent as in popular demos like “Walk in the Park” and “Jane is Fat”. Here, we find the band at its most earnest: bright and not so much hopeful, as open to future events. Daniel described the “unintentional themes” of these decidedly fun, yet earnest recordings: “With this EP, we had an youthful openness about what the future might bring. Not dreaming, but considering all of what could be… watching things unfold as they will, and being fine with it.

Dim Mak Releases:
DM107 Between The Devil And The Sea set to release July 10th, 2007

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