Oxbow: “1000 Hours”
A new Oxbow album called Love’s Holiday was announced today and incentive to pre-order is high with the new track “1000 Hours”, which features Jellyfish alum Roger Joseph Manning Jr. “There are a thousand hours in my day,” Eugene Robinson sings and I won’t argue. The gloom is palpable, a choir of ethereal throats adding some gospel to this band’s downward blues.
Love’s Holiday ends a six-year bout of silence from Oxbow, their last album, Thin Black Duke, released on Hydra Head Records in 2017. The album will be released by Ipecac Recordings on 7/21/23.
Bandcamp: https://oxbowofficial.bandcamp.com/album/loves-holiday-out-7-21-23
All info comes courtesy of Speakeasy PR.
OXBOW ANNOUNCE RELEASE NEW ALBUM, LOVE’S HOLIDAY, ON JULY 21 VIA IPECAC RECORDINGS
PREVIEW THE BAND’S FIRST NEW MUSIC IN SIX YEARS WITH “1000 HOURS”
PRE-ORDERS AVAILABLE HERE
April 18, 2023 – The inimitable four-piece OXBOW announce their first new music in six years with the anticipated release of Love’s Holiday (July 21, Ipecac Recordings). The album is preceded today by the lead single “1000 Hours” – a song featuring Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (Jellyfish/Beck) and a video directed by John David Levy.
About the track, vocalist and lyricist Eugene Robinson comments: “’1000 Hours’ for the OXBOW completist, 100 percent ties into our other song “1000,’ thematically in my mind. But filming the video, given that I just had surgery a few days before, felt very much like Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’ to me. You know where waiting to die never felt more beautiful, which really feels like the essence of love. Or at least one of them.”
Guitarist Niko Wenner adds: “’1000 Hours’ began life with the bright, extroverted feel you hear most, but inevitably the darker introspective mood of the coda and intro emerged. Both qualities are essential to Love’s Holiday. Roger (backing vocals), John (video director) and Joe Chiccarelli (co-producer of Love’s Holiday with Wenner) all did extraordinary work to heighten these emotions.”
Previous OXBOW albums found their impetus in a lyrical framework provided by Robinson, with Wenner applying his musical compositions to the singer’s narratives. However, Love’s Holiday began with the music. “The music was chiefly inspired by and written for my family. We’ve had two children born and my father die while writing and working on this record,” Wenner says. “The songs are just a collection of music that I sang to my babies and then wrote guitar parts for, and brought to the band as, OXBOW songs.” Love, the guitarist confirms was the organizing principle behind these songs, even if they still carry the band’s signature brand of drama and conflict.
“I’ve always been chagrined that no one understood that our songs were love songs,” Robinson says while reflecting on the band’s output from the last 35 years. Love may not have been the most obvious music in their earlier work, but the subject has never been more obvious now.
One of the more apparent manifestations of this new approach is the orchestration on Love’s Holiday. OXBOW has often employed auxiliary instrumentation as an addendum to the guitars on their recordings, but this time around, human voices are the primary addition. Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota) lends her soaring, operative vocals to “Lovely Murk,” while the layered choral bed of “1000 Hours” was provided by Roger Joseph Manning Jr (Jellyfish/Beck). The album also features a 15-person choir plus strings, oboe, flute, and clarinet.
For the differences in the process, Love’s Holiday is still very much an OXBOW album. Across its 10 tracks, Love’s Holiday feels feverish, disorienting, hostile, beguiling, defeated, and triumphant.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
