By 2017’s Thin Black Duke, Oxbow’s brand of sludge rock had blossomed into a grandiose blend of art rock, noise, neoclassical, and jazz. Like their uncompromisingly experimental brethren Swans, the San Francisco noise rockers experienced a resurgence in the autumn of their career, one made all the more remarkable by the pace of their output (the band had only released two other albums since 1996’s Serenade in Red).
Oxbow’s latest, Love’s Holiday, was inspired in part by the births of guitarist Niko Wenner’s two children and the death of his father, but that sentimental connection translates into something far removed from mawkish balladeering. Singer Eugene Robinson imbues the very concept of love with an element of foreboding on the album’s opening track, “Dead Ahead.” “Believe it, heed it/This god of love destroys and creates,” he yelps on the second verse.
Sonically, though, Love’s Holiday feels less like a punch in the gut and more like a warm embrace—at least in comparison Oxbow’s early releases. “Lovely Murk” opens with an interplay between Wenner’s guitar arpeggio, Dan Adams’s subtle bassline, and strings courtesy of Oliver Kraus, as Robinson’s pained vocals spin a tragic tale in the vein of John Cheever or Raymond Carver: “He said what he said and you said/‘You always understand what I mean’/That love is like hunger when you’re dying of thirst/And the end will always most assuredly come first.”
The best moments on Love’s Holiday feel truly limitless. The eerie choral voices, piano, and cymbal accents that open “All Gone” preface some of the album’s most emotionally raw moments as drummer Greg Davis’s snare hits mimic a fading heartbeat: “So give me air and close my mouth/Give me breath/Because how can I bear the ghost of you here?”
But while Oxbow’s newfound musical directness represents a fresh direction for the band, the album occasionally pares down the rowdy appeal and knottiness that has defined their catalog up to this point. The simple structure and driving rhythm of “Icy White & Crystalline” are enjoyable enough, but the song quickly fades from memory compared to the tracks that retain some of the group’s more elaborate tendencies.
Love’s Holiday finds Oxbow operating in a slightly different, more restrained register, but that means the album doesn’t quite reach the heights of its towering predecessor. Dropping a late-career masterwork after a decade without new material undoubtedly worked in Thin Black Duke’s favor. At the same time, by further stripping away the violence that defined their early sound, Oxbow also offers us a clearer picture of what makes them tick.
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