Oh-OK The Complete Reissue LP reissue
Reissue of a reissue of sorts (this originally came out about ten years ago but has been out-of-print ever since), The Complete Reissue collects the stand-alone vinyl output from Athens, Georgia’s minimal post-punk icons OH-OK (which is just two EPs—1982’s Wow Mini Album 7″ and 1983’s Furthermore What 12″), adding five mid-’80s live tracks and two otherwise unreleased reunion songs recorded in 2011 to round things out. The first EP is a snapshot of OH-OK at their most stripped-down, a trio of friends armed with a simple toolkit of just drums, bass, and voices to construct their short, highly rhythmic and danceable bursts of art-punk. Lynda Stipe and Linda Hopper’s vocals intertwine in subverted schoolyard chants like a much less kitsched-out version of Kate and Cindy from fellow Athenians the B-52’S, with Lynda’s rubbery and repeating DELTA 5-ish bass lines holding everything together. By the follow-up 12″, future power pop all-star Matthew Sweet had joined in on guitar and the song structures had gotten slightly more complex, with tracks like “Straight” steering the wild energy of their debut into a darker, moodier weird-pop direction without abandoning the group’s off-kilter charm. In both configurations of the band, OH-OK completely embodied a sense of playfulness and whimsy that I’m tempted to call “childlike,” but not in the infantilizing/patronizing way that term is often used (especially when describing the creative output of women)—it’s more that their songs exist in their own self-invented world, as art created primarily for the enjoyment of the people making it, unconcerned with following leads that they weren’t setting themselves. Unimpeachable genius sounds from the femme-punk underground.