Several months after Oxbow released their sixth album, 2007’s The Narcotic Story, frontman Eugene S. Robinson wrote a book about beating people up. It’s called Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for* Asking*, and it offers tips for achieving what Robinson refers to as “Zen and the Art of Kick Assertainment,” the ecstasy of sweet aches and bloody noses. The guy’s no casual sock-em-bopper: between his stints as a bouncer and a security guard, his extensive roster of martial arts skills (boxing, Kenpo karate, Muay Thai, wrestling, jiu-jitsu), and his history of choking out hecklers onstage, Robinson’s amassed a resume to rival any career pugilist.
But it’s not Robinson’s fists you should fear. His vocal chords, rather, are unsettling, protean howls defiant of genre, convention, or common sense. The same goes for Oxbow, who’ve spent the past quarter-century or so churning out some of the most eccentric (and criminally underrated) heavy music albums ever made. Now, the Bay Area group are back for another genre-bending fight with their first album in over a decade, Thin Black Duke.
Chaos may be Oxbow’s calling card, but on Thin Black Duke, the insanity is a facade. In a press release, composer and producer Niko Wenner (who co-founded the project alongside Robinson in 1989, as a duo) framed the album as an exercise in “large scale coherence.” It undertakes the classical practice of populating mammoth soundscapes with leitmotifs (a melodic phrase, a lyric, a subject) that function like aural trail markers. Sometimes the details manifest as a chorus, like in the wailed refrain on “Letter of Note.” Other times, it’s with repeated references to the titular character himself—whose story proves nearly impossible to parse out when issued forth from Robinson’s venomous gut.
Robinson wields his voice as a vehicle for disorder, and by extension, transcendence. He doesn’t sing with the music, but against it. On the album’s most immediate song, the turbulent piano-rocker “A Gentleman’s Gentleman,” he traces the performative trajectory of a paradoxical couplet (“And when the Duke talks, he sounds like a mime/With his hands doing all the talking”). The phrase initially clambers out of the bluesy miasma as a rabid, incomprehensible whisper (“Andwhentheduketalkshesoundslikeamime”); it then gets thrown on the rack for some syllable-stretching (“His haaaaaaaands doing all the talking”) before emerging from the torture refreshed.
Lightyears away from the unpredictable, exhausting pacing of their early work, Thin Black Duke reflects a formalism that places it closer to Faith No More than Scratch Acid. Where past albums find Oxbow trapped in the eye of the storm with nowhere to run, Thin Black Duke’s tracklist contains a clear arc: a gnarled beginning, all clattering riffs and piercing screams, a dreamlike middle swath. And the six-and-a-half-minute closer “The Finished Line” is a satisfying climax, uniting the album’s scattered stylistic flirtations under the banner of carnal dramaturgy. With Thin Black Duke, Oxbow once again envision a world domineered by disorder, a carnivalesque arena where music’s most intimidating, grandiose genres (free jazz, high-concept chamber pop, noise, neoclassical, metal) can duke it out like gladiators one minute, and come together for a grotesque group hug the next. It may not be their definitive show of force, but it’s a dazzling spectacle nonetheless.
