Description

After seven records, multiple world tours, a documentary (Music For Adults), TV appearances, and collaborations (Marianne Faithfull, Lydia Lunch, Jarboe, Klaus Flouride, Richard Kern), Oxbow presented the 2007 album, The Narcotic Story, the first in a triptych (to later include both a film and a soundtrack) of successful and beautiful ruin. This provocative San Francisco-based quartet Oxbow was formed in the late 80s and its a band that is hard to put a label on. This is post-hardcore experimental music that includes anything and everything from free jazz to blues to sludge. On The Narcotic Story we have slide guitar work that reigns throughout the offering, along with sludgy noise and sparse bits of drumming to create murky, bleak, and frigid soundscapes. Unsettling hooks weave in and out of reed organs, interstitial whistles, pianos, violins, violas, and even violoncellos. Eugene’s vocals are more deranged and pathological than ever and he even sounds vulnerable in places (perhaps even guilty). Oxbow’s performances have no equal its urgent, intelligent, grandiose, intense and yet frugal and most of all original.

Track list:
1. Mr. Johnson
2. The Geometry Of Business
3. Time, Gentlemen, Time
4. Down A Stair Backward
5. She’s A Find
6. Frankly Frank
7. A Winner Every Time
8. Frank’s Frolic
9. It’s The Giving, Not The Taking