A guy dies and goes to Hell. The devil tells him that he has three choices as to where he'll spend his eternal damnation. The devil opens a door, behind which people writhe in perpetual flames. "No way," says the guy. The devil opens another door, behind which people convulse on an electrified floor. "Uh-uh," says the guy. The devil opens a third door. Behind it, people are buried to their necks in excrement, each sipping a cup of tea with one free hand. "Well, beats the other two," says the guy. "I'll take it." He eases into the filth, and just as he takes his first sip of tea, a voice comes over Hell's intercom: "Okay everybody, tea break's over-- back on your heads!"
The joke, like most, masks multiple profundities-- that we all create our own Hells, that none of our vaunted free will or personal agency will keep us from our final reward, and that poo is funny. But while most of us choose one Hell, Oxbow's Eugene Robinson is in the unique position of residing simultaneously in all three. A slab of lurid and tattooed muscle, often near-nude, Robinson strikes a fearsome presence at Oxbow shows, seeming to writhe as if burned and shudder as if electrocuted at once. (This is a guy who out-scaried Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart on his own song, a harrowing cover of "Saturn".) And given his gibbering delivery and nihilistic lyrics, which always seem unhealthily scatological even when they don't deal specifically with shit, he would probably be quite comfy in the third room of Hell, especially were the tea replaced with something more potent: embalming fluid, perhaps, or bleach.
Oxbow have been a metal band, one steadily moving into more credibly frightening territory. At this point, one can scarcely identify them with traditional metal's canned, often hokey menace, as The Narcotic Story fully embraces a sort of slow-burning, infernal blues. It's a malign transmission, sparser than Oxbow's more metallic styles, and, paradoxically, much heavier. After establishing its extreme poles with a brief intro of piercing ambient tones and heavy-bowelled bleats, The Narcotic Story sustains a deft balance between creeping dirges and panicky rock for its duration. Its evocative disorder is remindful of U.S. Maple, and Robinson's blood-curdling polecat yowl recalls David Yow and the Frogs in equal measure.
"Geometry of Business" is a raw-boned, blowsy blues with fuzz bass bombs and creeping pianos-- the lyrics, as elsewhere on the album, are mostly, mercifully, unintelligible. Through repeated false starts, the noodly quiet of "Time Gentlemen Time" arduously erupts into a sturdy rock slog, shrill tones rising up from the wrecked chords and howled imprecations. By the time the crusty blues-metal swagger of "Down a Stair Backward" bleeds into the orchestral butt-jazz of "She's a Find", it's clear that Oxbow's usual laddering plod is doubled in effect by the more elegant, tension-building passages that they've stitched, Frankenstein's-monster-style, into it. Every piano-laced tea break is cut short by a sulfurous blare, and then it's back onto our heads, back into Robinson's world of shit.
