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Music

No Band Loves Anything As Much As O'Brother Loves Sriracha

We joined the Atlanta band for a pre-show pho dinner.

Four members of O’Brother are seated around a table at Thái Son, a pho restaurant in New York’s Chinatown, rolling up their shirt sleeves or lifting up pant legs. On each of them, a cock. A rooster that is. More specifically, it’s a tattoo of the rooster from the sriracha logo. You’re required to have one to be in the band.

Needless to say, the Atlanta band is dead serious about their sriracha. Besides the matching tats, their most popular merch item is a red t-shirt with the rooster logo and “O’BROTHER” printed across the top. They also travel with a bottle of it in their van. You know, for emergencies. It was a new bottle at the start of tour but from the looks of it, there’s no chance in hell it will last the remaining two weeks. “There have been a few times where we ran out and offered guest list spots if people brought us a bottle,” says guitarist, Johnny Dang. Johnny’s brother and the band’s bassist, Anton, chimes in: “We’ll tweet it once and have like, four or five people who bring us bottles.”

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O’Brother don’t fuck around with their pho orders either. They don’t ask the waiter for “the number one” or “the chicken pho.” They ask for “Pho Ga,” pronounced in stellar dialect (which sounds like “fuh,” not “foe,” you ignorant gringo). It doesn’t hurt that the Dang brothers are Vietnamese either.

The official tattoo of O'Brother.

Over the course of dinner, something about O’Brother becomes fishy. The band members are quicker and more at ease when fielding questions about pho and sriracha than about their music. When asked about their musical influences, there is a long silence while their eyes dart nervously around the table to meet one another’s. It’s the same look little kids give each other when a parent asks how the couch got a huge hole in it and no one wants to rat each other out. The members eventually start to sheepishly rattle off bands like Cave In, Isis, and Neurosis before immediately interrupting themselves about eating techniques. “No, see,” critiques guitarist/singer Tanner Merritt, “I like to taste the broth first, before I stir it up.”

When prompted, the band cobbles together a half-assed answer about how they’d describe their sound but can rattle off a comprehensive and detailed list of the best cities for pho. (Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, New York, and Chicago have the best, if you’re curious. They didn’t care for the pho in Vancouver though.) After a while, O’Brother starts to seem less like a musical endeavor and more like an excuse to travel the country, sampling regional pho and bartering with locals for sriracha.

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Jordan McGhin, the band’s other guitarist/singer is the first to finish his meal and powers through the few remaining slurps of his bowl to a round of applause and cheers from the rest of the band. His eyes are watering because the bottom is pretty much just straight sriracha. “You can always count on Jordan to finish a whole bowl of pho,” notes Johnny.

The other members soon also down their bowls which are so big that Anton says they’re are called “xe lửa” in Vietnamese, which translates into “trains.” Then, a sudden, horrible realization dawns on them. “I’m probably gonna shit myself on stage,” Anton thinks aloud. And indeed, the guys do look more ready to take a hearty shit, or at least a nap, than play music, which they are scheduled to do across the street in an hour at Santos Party House, where their show has already started. Most of them are in post-pho catatonic states or sniffling up their hot sauce-induced runny noses. They’re also using their napkins to wipe sweat off their faces. They’ve got the “pho sweats,” as they proudly dub them. “If you’re not in pain, then you’re not doing it the right way,” brags Jordan. But pride begins to give way to regret. “Ugh, Present Me just flicked off Future Me,” he says a few minutes later. “I was such a dick to Future Me on this bowl.”

For the past hour, O’Brother have been doling out pho-eating tips—how to properly sample a broth, the perfect sriracha-to-basil ratio, what beverages compliment which dishes. But as they sit comatose-like, they recall a cardinal rule of pho. A rule they remember a few minutes too late: When eating pho, “plan on not doing anything for an hour because you get pho drunk and can’t function.” But fuck it, their set time is in a few minutes and sriracha shits or not, they’ve got a job to do.

Just minutes later, O’Brother are doing a surprisingly good job of keeping it together on stage. Watching their live act is a lot like watching any movie ever’s depiction of entering heaven. There’s an enormous cloud of fog, so much so that you can only make out the outlines of the band members. Buried behind the mist are gigantic flood lights, probably way bigger and more powerful than should be on a small-to-medium-sized stage. All that’s missing is a voice shouting, “Come towards the light!”

O’Brother don’t speak much in between songs. Really, the only times they do are to remind people that they’ve got a new album out. Most of their set is just a non-stop onslaught of headbanging and hairwhipping. Pretty impressive for a bunch of dudes who just collectively inhaled a small river of sriracha. O’Brother’s loud-as-hell brand of metally drone rock sounds similar to that of Torche or Baroness with vocals eerily resembling a less pretentious version of Muse.

It’s hard to recall exactly what happens during one of O’Brother’s sets. That’s probably not a mistake either. The whole thing feels like it’s designed to lull you into a rhythmic daze. The longer O’Brother’s set goes on, the more totally entranced you get by the ethereal experience of their smoke and light show. But right as you feel like a giant spaceship door is about to close on them and take them back to E.T.’s home planet, they’re done. On to a new city. On to new sriracha.