There is no time like the now-time, and despite having found their start in the latter days of the ’80s, Oxbow—whose fire and brimstone has found them, over the course of eight records, reviling orthodoxy—has, with their newest album, zigged right around when you might have expected them to zag. Love’s Holiday, a 10-song meditation on love, its glories, and its terrible limitations, saw producer Joe Chiccarelli and guitarist/composer Niko Wenner at the helm of a mordantly, curiously uplifting, unconditional take on the human condition.
With vocal assists from Roger Manning Jr. and Lingua Ignota, Oxbow delivers what Aaron Turner of Sumac once described as “not what I expected but everything I hoped for.” Using a choir, oboes, flutes, clarinets, cellos, violins, synth basses, an assortment of keyboards, and Oxbow’s usual bass, drums, guitars, and vocals, the mise-en-scène for Love’s Holiday correctly captures at least the last two existential stages of grief—depression and acceptance—in their entirety. Opening with nautical imagery and ending with the same, Oxbow plunges Jungian depths to fully meet Turner’s aforementioned letter of the law.
With the record out now via Ipecac Recordings, Oxbow—Wenner along with Dan Adams, Greg Davis, and Eugene S. Robinson—took us track by track through Love’s Holiday, sharing the yeoman’s work that went into making it all seem so simple.
1. “Dead Ahead”
Dan Adams: Is there any other course, really? Though the ups and downs can be profound when one pays attention, smoothing and filtering algorithms of the long view, or the dissolving of buoying perspectives, lay bare the ultimate straight-line path.
This track, without intention or forethought when created, exposes and foreshadows structural themes which color the record. The rhythm—on the surface frantic and choppy—is dominated instead by a sub-groove which is far more suited to affairs of the heart than harshly straight eights or simplistic shapes. Chord motions above foundations refuse to follow, and chord or harmonic motions stay static above motion below. Classic musical elements. Simplicity is subverted a bit by structural elements. Like the ups and downs, the joys and sorrows which obscure the straight line path. Dead ahead. As are we all.
2. “Icy White & Crystalline”
Greg Davis: Mined from the seemingly endless library of Oxbow rehearsal improvs. Early versions had a Richard Hell/Voidoids kind of trashy feel. With that ’70s punk minimalist thing stuck in my head, I played the bridge as straight two-four as I could. Niko and I never really agreed on the placement of the one. Evidenced by the single synchronizing hit at the top (Niko’s one, my four) and the odd tension in the transitions from verse to chorus. Ten hits at the end because nine was too few, 11 too many.
3. “Lovely Murk”
Niko Wenner: Written in late 2011 from the imagined perspective of my mother, then in a locked ward unable to recognize me or anyone due to Alzheimer’s and dementia. Asking, “What would it be like to lose everything—even yourself?” She died in early 2012, delaying, through a chain of events, the start of recording Thin Black Duke for almost exactly one year. That song felt way too personal even for Oxbow. Then Lisa Meyer booked Oxbow Orchestra for her Supersonic Festival in Birmingham Fall 2012. Inspired, and seeking [something] unique and new, I arranged the music for string quartet and two each, trumpets, horns, and tubas, the orchestration you hear on Love’s Holiday.
Come 2019, I was ready to put the guitar and vocal melody on an Oxbow record. So in dialog with Joe Chiccarelli I moved the key down a minor third and sent the written arrangement, backstory, new lyric, and my 2011 song demo to Kristin Hayter, who had graciously agreed to create a Lingua Ignota choir from the original melody, and, an entirely new part to the art-song-quote bridge. A hell of a journey for this simple tune. The coda is Joe’s sound treatment of a shorter bridge from the 2012 version.
4. “1000 Hours”
Eugene S. Robinson: Ambiguity, as in the title Love’s Holiday, is on full display here wherein it’s not clear—nor is it supposed to be—whether or not having a day as long as a thousand hours is good or desirable. It either means time is flying, like when you’re having fun, or dragging, as in when you’re not. Though my vocal tilts the scales one way it’s the dual-ness of the entire erotic enterprise that makes this work as it works. It also helped that I was still tanked up on post-surgery meds during the filming of the video.
5. “All Gone”
Dan: To me, this is the apex. The weight of this track is not at all fooling around. As a reference point, the Cleo Laine performance I found felt like a look back through somewhat softened optics, on something once monumental and now viewed from a point of at least moderate and accepting comfort. Here, Eugene’s singing of his and her lyrics is from the heart of the hurt, the feeling of how love now gone consumes by seemingly dissolving one’s soul and gutting one’s purpose. It’s beautiful, honoring the way that intensity exposes the brilliance of being alive even when one might not want to be. Oxbow continues to love the unfiltered, the unshaded, the laid bare.
Musically, the restraint, the unfettered and consonant harmonic landings, the spectrum of organic and electrified instruments plus choir, the pocket, the pedal tones in the low end, the quality of sounds and broad solidity of attack all meld into a gravity which gently and slowly sucks the air out of my lungs.
6. “The Night the Room Started Burning”
Eugene: An obvious tip of the hat to Johnny Hartman’s “The Day the World Stopped Turning,” this song grew out of a dark five days ensconced in a hotel eating nothing but blancmange, sweating and burning the candles brightly and from both ends. The thing I’ve always loved about film noir is that at the start you know, or should realize, that everyone you’ll come to know by way of character development will meet a grim end. This is like that. But with love.
7. “ ”
Niko: Begun circa 2012, alone facing west at the kitchen table, San Francisco, my white Stratocaster acoustic/no amp, phone recording, then 2022 in France among family, headphones, layering that mono recording in Pro Tools with different start times, a nod to the tape-choir of Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” the tempo entropy made to slowly re-sync; finally, adding a phone recording of a mysterious tuned-exhaust fan located where long ago the ocean met land in now-downtown San Francisco, the “drone” of the working title “Happy Drone.”
8. “Million Dollar Weekend”
Niko: Intended as a classical guitar and voice piece, my circa-2002 demo is so ancient that I can now sing and play the guitar parts simultaneously. The recording arrangement features a pseudo Pierrot Ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, with our pal and esteemed colleague Kyle Bruckmann on oboe making his third appearance on an Oxbow studio album.
9. “The Second Talk”
Greg: The most old-school Oxbow song on the record. Though it’s somewhat deemphasized in this version from how we rehearsed it, that three-four-five count that brackets the middle has always been the emotional hook for me. It’s my opinion that we should have played the ending longer, however we made the adult choice. Too bad, as once the big diesel Oxbow engine gets rolling it does not want to stop, rod knock and broken lifter be damned.
10. “Gunwale”
Niko: I would record my improvised singing to each of my newborn kids going to bed, or when they would wake pre-dawn needing a diaper or a bottle. Listening later I realized I was at concert pitch, oddly in tune with the piano there in the dark, often straight from sleep. Not perfect pitch. But a real discovery after more than 50 years of singing.
This particular melody, sung to my intently focused baby boy one early morning in 2018, fit a D major blues. I arranged that melody for a 15-member mixed choir that we double tracked in the studio, and we used the final bass, drums, and guitar take, the only one with an extended improv at the end. Pro Tools crashed midway in the first vocal take, so we had to restart from there; the final choir chord gave me a shiver of pleasure hearing it sung in the studio the first time. One of my favorite moments on Love’s Holiday.
