oxbow: supersonic (part one)

okay part one of the supersonic build up begins with oxbow.

narcotic story released last year on cd, and this year on vinyl (thanks to those lovely southern people) was one of my favourites.  i described it thusly:

“the best dressed album this year.  classy, ugly, threatening and that’s just the those involved.  like tom waits with a headful of crack and a rusted blade in each hand.  this record would fuck you in prison.”

eugene describes it as “a disturbing stroll through a place where everything’s broken.”

you get the picture?

it’s some kind of allen ginsberg by way of hunter s. thompson by way of irvine welsh musical.  except instead of dancing there’s a muscled gentleman in his underwear looking for a reason to do something.

how to describe them?  it’s strange wordy music, strange in the sense that they hit you in the gut/balls while some fucker diverts your attention with talk of avant garde and intellectual and art and performance. it’s certainly all of these things.  it’s fraught and emotional (and i do mean emotional), ugly and unusually human in these polite times.  it’s oddly masculine in this uncomfortably metrosexual world.

full of (de)constructed mangled blues and smokey strings and frankly provocative rock oxbow are a feedbacking dirty squall of guitar music, angled and amusingly/disturbingly zappa-ish.

sawmill

oxbow do not fuck around to quote elsewhere.

geometry of business from last years supersonic:

s bar x:

down a stair backward:

oxbow / oxspace / hydrahead / neurot / southern / supersonic

(noxagt: part two)