Rank Your Records: Oxbow's Eugene Robinson and Niko Wenner Wrestle with Their Catalog

In Rank Your Records, we talk to members of bands who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference Oxbow have never taken the easy route. Singer/lyricist Eugene Robinson and guitarist/composer Niko Wenner—two former members of the San Francisco hardcore band Whipping Boy—formed Oxbow in 1988, initially as a recording project. The group eventually expanded into a full quartet, developed a reputation as a fearsome live act, and has existed on the border between punishing noise rock and experimental metal for decades since. The band's infamous live shows, where trained fighter Robinson often used to deal with hecklers in a decidedly physical fashion (read: choking them into unconsciousness), have sometimes tended to overshadow their substantial and painstaking discography—and it's a damn shame, because Oxbow is one of the few bands who have existed for nearly 30 years without one bad record to their name.

The band debuted in 1989 with Fuckfest, an intricately arranged and recorded art-metal album that used compositional techniques from 20th century classical music. It was intended as something of a musical suicide note for Robinson, and introduced an initially consistent lyrical theme of love gone spectacularly wrong. A variety of people played on the album besides Robinson and Wenner, including former Dead Kennedys bassist Klaus Flouride, and percussion duties were split between drummers Greg Davis and Tom Dobrov. Dobrov elected to remain as the group's drummer afterward. Dan Adams, a former drummer for Whipping Boy, joined as the band's permanent bassist soon after Fuckfest’s release, and brought an oddly jazz-inflected and lyrical element to the group.

After a period of intensive musical experimentation, King of the Jews was released in 1991. The album considerably expanded the group's sound and songwriting, and featured even more abstract, elaborate and studio-dependent arrangements than before. Let Me Be a Woman was recorded in 1993 with Steve Albini, but didn't see release until 1995; in the interim, Tom Dobrov left the band to get a Ph.D in nursing at Yale University and join the Navy. Musically, Let Me Be a Woman managed to condense the impossibly arty complexity of the first two albums into a riffier, slightly more accessible format; it stands as their most concise early album.

After Greg Davis once again joined Oxbow, this time as their permanent drummer, Serenade In Red was released in 1996. Serenade In Red marked a step back to the more discursive musical tendencies of the first two albums, albeit with much greater control, and marked a conscious step toward overt theatricality. This shift in conceptual method would take increasing precedence over the years. Six years passed between Serenade In Red and 2002's An Evil Heat, which managed to be heavier and more accessible than albums past without sacrificing an inch of the artiness that had always marked Oxbow before. Neurosis's label Neurot Recordings released the album, and this temporary association helped to solidify a growing fanbase within experimental metal for the band. Hydra Head then signed the band for 2007's The Narcotic Story, their most accessible recording to date: a deliberately cinematic, semi-noirish, orchestrated concept album that told a full-length story about a character named Frank Johnson.

In October this year, Oxbow are finally set to release the almost decade-in-the-making follow-up to The Narcotic Story, titled The Thin Black Duke. True to form, both Robinson and Wenner say that the new album is their greatest accomplishment (though as per the Rank Your Records rules, we haven't included it here).

"At the end of this I have to say, in all honesty, Oxbow's entire oeuvre is as challenging of a thing as I have ever been involved in, and whose "success" was never guaranteed as it was about war with self, others, fate, circumstance and shorn of a moral framework, making it strange to use, but a certain kind of evil," Robinson reflects. "Tough to spend 5 minutes like this. Even tougher to do so for 25 years. Post-The Thin Black Duke… the expectation should be for a kinder and more beautiful Oxbow. Because? Because we've earned it. Maybe."

Anticipation is understandably high for The Thin Black Duke; in Robinson's words, “you may not enjoy it, but it'll be one of the best records you've heard." And that, in a line, sums up both Oxbow's ironclad artistic self-belief and their artistic M.O. in general: driven, uncompromising, and obsessively crafted.

(Note: The following rankings, from least favorite to favorite, are Robinson's.)

Eugene Robinson: Sometimes to write a record, you must live a record. OXBOW, lyrically, journals all of that living.

Noisey: Was the character of Frank Johnson necessary as a way to distance yourself from the implied content of The Narcotic Story?
ER: Well, the Internet has made concealing very much of anything from potential employers very difficult. So calling the character Frank is not something that would have saved me in any case. But there is this: due to how long our process is, the records are usually representative of lagged time. For example, I do this other project BUNUEL. It's an Italian band, and I sing and write the lyrics for it, but we have a song there called "The Smiling Faces of My Children." Well, my children are now 13, 17, and 19… and this is the first time they've appeared in any song I've been involved with, to give you a sense of what I mean.

But the name Frank was used because the story was not all mine. It was also the story of a dear friend of mine, whose fortunes and future were intimately related to mine in all the ways suggested by the record. After mental institutions and multiple rehabs he, in a quirky twist of fate, went on to make himself a millionaire. Probably a darker conclusion than even I could have crafted, even if I had known it at the time. But using "Frank" was just easier than saying "Me and Bill." Moreover, my personal addictions have not ever been substance based.

The Narcotic Story was our first album with Joe Chiccarelli, whose time spent winning Grammys worked well for us—so well, that when he got nominated for producer of the year for producing us along with The Shins and Kurt Elling, we were all actually shocked when we lost to Amy Winehouse, even if she and Ronson deserved to win.

Niko Wenner: I had the most fun with the concept for The Narcotic Story, where the music strengthens and clarifies the drama that is otherwise fairly obliquely outlined by the lyrics. The opening dream-sequence instrumental "Mr. Johnson" lays out in sound the essential conflict in the story: the character Frank Johnson's battle between his own natural internal state, and that of the external "unnatural" world. The two opposing forces are portrayed musically by untempered naturally-occurring-overtones music, and tempered-tuning music. After forty-odd minutes of sonic adventures, the story ends with the song "It's the Giving, Not the Taking," where one of the record's main themes reappears changed from minor to Major, and the music joyously unhinged, just as Frank himself progresses from unhappy and fettered to happy and cut-loose. The nature sounds, bird calls, wind, water, at the end brings the story to it's "natural" conclusion. Check the fade-out for what really happens to Frank.

ER: A transitional record. Exciting because it was the first we worked on with Steve Albini, after having done Fuckfest and King of the Jews with Bart Thurber in the house where we lived. But lyrically I had wearied of living as much as I had wearied of the idea of dying. So the lyrics were exhausting and smeared-over nightmare-scapes of things I'd never thought I'd write about. Abuse, bad insanity and music as a clearinghouse for the unhealthy. I suspect I was torn between working my way back into a suicidal frame of mind and a new idea that I had been nurturing at the time that there were many who deserved to die a lot more readily than I did.

I remember Eugene once saying a while ago that he was a little annoyed at the characteristically Albini mixing decision of keeping the vocals a bit low on Let Me Be a Woman.
ER: I thought the vocals were too low, but I'm not a complainer and was not annoyed. Just wished it was different. On Serenade In Red, I watched it though and it was more to my liking. NW: Personally, the vocal level on Let Me Be a Woman is fine.

How does the making of each album play into your appreciation of your own work? For example, Let Me Be a Woman is the Oxbow album with far and away the quickest turnaround time in the studio; recorded and mixed in a few days, while others have taken months, or even years to put together. Do those experiences help or hinder your appreciation of the albums, or do you judge the albums separately from those experiences?
NW: Let Me Be a Woman was created to be performed essentially live in the studio and that was great and worked well, especially in context with the extended, meticulous, laborious studio albums that came before it. While it was cool to be finished quickly, I missed some of the thoughtful complexity that the more studio-intensive recordings had. It was four twelve-hour days in succession from studio load-in to load-out. It's a great record and I'd love to do that again. I must say, though, that the fact that it took two years to get that 1993 recording finally released in 1995, and then only ever in Europe, probably does have some sort of subliminal encouragement of our normal drawn-out recording process.

ER: Suicide note. You ever read the suicide notes you've written after not having committed suicide? Yeah, me neither. But the record was great, as it was constructed in my garage as a solo record. I had the lyrics and the song sketches. Started laying down drum patterns, but realized very soon that I was not Prince and I didn't have the time to wait, so I asked Whipping Boy's guitar player at the time, Niko Wenner, to help me out, and song by song we created Fuckfest. The one proviso: no fucking guitar solos. They were unnatural. Call it our Dogme take on music.

Are there any regrets you have about any of the albums in retrospect?
ER: I still cringe when I hear "Hunger." It was all improvised and I have a couple of line readings that were emotionally off key.

"Emotionally off key" is a very interesting phrase. So you mean imbuing a lyric with an emotional expression that doesn't fit with the overall emotional atmosphere of the song? Also, you're maybe the one singer I've encountered who referred to the singing as "line reading."
ER: Well, "Hunger" was both part of some sort of quasi-Southern Gothic lyrical thing I was doing, as well as spelling out the suicidal ideation I'd been speaking of. "Murder, spoke he up… Hanging from this crooked arm… this grave will never hold me." Veiled, or maybe not so veiled, the song's failing for me in terms of my performance comes from forgetting for just half a beat that this was, like the rest of the record, not performance, but an effort to commit to recording tape the most honest take on why I was going to do what I was going to do.

But there's just one, like, 3 second section of the song where I can hear, like a Danzig or a Hetfield, that I made a vocal choice that didn't come from that place but was just the vocal equivalent of "not knowing what else to do here." Also, it's a stifled scream. So why stifle? For whom? If there had been a belief that one person left alive would care about me not being alive, well, this would undercut everything, and this 3 second section did so for me on this song. And before I had ever thought about doing music, I was on stage. So yes, line reading. Making sure the intention and the action line up nicely with what I'm thinking and feeling and the dictates of my damned artistic soul [laughs].

Following on from that: Oxbow has always seemed like a deeply conceptual project to me, but how has the concept evolved over time? For example, I always assumed that since Fuckfest was intended as a musical suicide note, the music's circular motifs were supposed to play into a feeling of cyclical hopelessness.
ER: Like kabuki theater, or maybe not at all like kabuki theater, the conceits have shifted in order to better conceal what was a fairly coherent lyrical and thematic obsession. So, while the concept has changed in form, in substance it was the telling of a slowly evolving story that runs the gamut of real existential concerns. NW: Deeply conceptual yes, though hopefully never at the expense of music that is arresting, entertaining, satisfying. There has sometimes been a disconnect between the words and the music. For example, the music on Fuckfest had nothing to do with some sort of last testament. The musical palindromes were instead partially based on admiration for Bartók's use of the same form, for example in his Fourth String Quartet. So yes, the concept, and methodology, has changed album-to-album, with the overarching artistic vision being to make long-form music recordings (rather than a collection of songs) every time.

ER: When love dies, sex is unbridled. Fevered, crazy and so painfully accurate in its take on unrestrained id that I can't even talk about it. Recorded by Gibbs Chapman, who never recorded another record and became a filmmaker instead. That's how hard it was.

NW: An Evil Heat was back to the "do it 'till you're satisfied" slow studio work, where we actually cut basics for every song twice, once each in two different studios with highly contrasting acoustics. The unifying elements are reoccurring musical sequences, sometimes riffs, that show up in different keys and tempos in various different songs, and the idea of "drone." The latter shows most clearly in the nine-person, double drum kit, live-in-the-studio, 32-minute long directed-improvisation "Shine (Glimmer)."

ER: "Not what I expected but everything I had hoped for" was what Aaron Turner had said about The Narcotic Story, and it held as true as an ethos goes for Serenade In Red. Ambitious in scope and the first of a darker turn for Oxbow, which is pretty amazing if you consider that the first two were suicide notes. The lyrics are a condensed love affair gone wrong, and gone to murder. Rife with paranoia, suspicion, animal jealousies, it was our second record with Steve Albini and the better one, largely on account of him giving us more time, by a few days, and us knowing him better. The lyrics were also some of the best I'd written in terms of carrying the story well and concealing truths about my motivations for writing them.

My one regret: we never used the overly literal dinner argument scene, though it was recorded, that ended with crockery and glassware smashed to bits.

Is that ever going to end up as a track on a reissue of Serenade In Red?

ER: [Laughs] I expect this would only end up on a re-issue, and maybe not even then. I also regret the destruction of our relationship with Marianne Faithfull, who sang on this, a year before Metallica had the same idea and used her to much lesser effect. Our time with Albini was a personal high point for me, seconded only by his praise for my Fight book, which—and he doesn't know this—actually brought me to tears as he had been an early influence. Not with his music as much as his writing. So nice closing of the circle.

NW: We dug working with Albini and did so again for Serenade in Red, where the concept was to strike a balance between first-take live performances, and our other M.O.: taking more time and care with things like overdubs. And also like flying to Dublin, Ireland, to record Marianne Faithfull for a couple songs we'd already begun, and then stay up until dawn playing piano and reed organ overdubs.

Which albums do you feel are most successful conceptually, and which albums do you feel are most successful musically? Is the most successful Oxbow album the one which strikes the best balance between music and concept?
ER: Serenade In Red, An Evil Heat, The Narcotic Story, and, of course, The Thin Black Duke are the most successful conceptually and musically, though I would expect the rest of Oxbow to feel differently. There might be some confusion about what constitutes "successful”; but in my mind, intent and actualization, as well as lyrical craft and musical sophistication in getting all of the above across, is what I mean when I think "successful."

It's almost impossible for any musician, singer, songwriter, etc. to pick a favorite song that they've ever done. But is there any one song which you really, really love from the catalog and feel really represents Oxbow?
ER: "3 O'Clock" off of Serenade In Red. NW: That song is "The Valley" from our first record Fuckfest. The song that is most "Oxbow." I felt it was an Ur-moment when we did it, and then fought the idea for a while before giving in. Other songs, like "She's a Find" on The Narcotic Story and "The Finished Line" on the new record, The Thin Black Duke, are quite close. "The Valley" and "The Finished Line" came to me almost all of a piece at once as songs. On the other hand, "She's a Find" I honed off-and-on for twenty years. So I don't think for me there's a single "magic" way to make that kind of song.

ER: Great artwork by Fantagraphics god Jim Blanchard, who completely subverted expectations of what a record called King of the Jews would sound like by upending what it lookrf like. With it's Sammy Davis Jr. cover, though we found it necessary to obscure the swastika pendant Sammy sported in the illustration, it managed to be "funny" without being "humorous", befitting a record prefigured as the latter half of a suicide letter started with Fuckfest. And working with Lydia Lunch on it was just about a dream come true, largely because of her understanding that despite not knowing exactly what the record was about, it was all about dying.

NW: The first two records I set a goal of balancing an all-encompassing structure, with the intentionally messy/passionate performances. On Fuckfest and King of the Jews, the arch-form is evidenced in micro ways—like a symmetrical octatonic scale for a guitar solo—to macro ways, like the entirety of the seventy minutes of music comprising the two albums combining as a whole under the unifying structure. That juxtaposition of precision and exuberance, was both fun and successful, I thought. The fact that no one really notices the cool structure I see alternately as a drawback or a bonus.

What are things about the albums that you're especially proud of in retrospect? I remember, for instance, that Eugene once said a few years ago that he was happy with how totally off-the-wall King of the Jews is musically.
ER: I still hear King of the Jews as one of the best records I've ever heard, regardless of genres. It’s like having a favorite child, a concept I shit on in general as I love all of my kids equally and with as much passion even if we don't always get along. But King of the Jews might be my favorite.

I'm also super proud of certain lyrical flourishes… "they say some of the best things in life are free, but everything around here comes with a fee" off of The Thin Black Duke pleases me a lot. "The Stabbing Hand," off of Let Me Be a Woman, I like for all of the reasons you could like it, and indeed enough that that's the only Oxbow song title I have tattooed on my body. Oh, yeah, and "Crawling in cruelty, I take my delight, in perpetuity"… these all give me some not small amount of pleasure. Also my guitar work on Fuckfest, [laughs] one song where I play and use every effect in the studio at the time on it, a high point for me too. And oh yeah, my harmonica work there too.

NW: I'm actually happy with each album, despite and because they are quite essentially different in important ways. And I have to say that it is perhaps an occupational hazard that I see the recordings as existing in a large "now," not receding into the past. A flattened historical view where they are all "the recent present." The result is that I feel that we do not need to repeat the sonic experimentation of King of the Jews because "we already did that" and not long ago. One benefit is that I feel compelled to do something new and different. For me, our essential character is clear and strong in every recording, so making the records "different" isn't a negative.

The way we write is closely tied to recording, and has been almost always this: I take music I've started by myself that is nearly complete, almost-finished song ideas, and assign them to lyrics that Eugene has already completed. I'll bring that music to Dan and Greg, usually with a clear suggestion for a bass line and drum part, which together over many rehearsals they will without-fail improve on and sometimes radically alter. Sometimes they will do the same to my guitar and piano parts. When we've as a group arrived at an instrumental song, which takes into rough account where I think the words should fall, before recording I'll assign specific lyric stanzas, lines, and or words, to musical events like "verse" "chorus" "bridge." Often I'll suggest repeating a line, or word, or stanza. And then we will record the music and usually arrive at something very close to the way we rehearsed it, unless the goal involves improvisation of the whole or a section. "It's the Giving, Not the Taking" and the middle of "Frank's Frolic" were two recent songs involving some level of studio improvisation. Then, Eugene will perform the lyrics and often arrive at something quite different from my meticulous suggestions. The last few records we've recorded the vocals to digital which allows me to tweak the fairly improvisatory vocal performances.