Review Summary: I am Jesus, thy saviour. Ready thy cheeks for clappage, thy ass for dickage!
Eugene Robinson loves all his children equally, but he loves King of the Jews the best. He said that to Vice once.* His ragtag family of wizards make musical theory and intellectualism as punk as spiked hair and cheap cocaine, eager to dress like your local Christian band (with titles like King of the Jews they may even have at one point been mistaken for such), only to go the other way and soundtrack Satan’s own nightmares. They are keen on dissecting noise and rock into molecules, carefully examining every content to create the perfect blend, learning meticulously, practicing vigorously, only to get on stage for a live audience and throw the theory out the window, delivering a manic hellscape akin to danger music. What Oxbow employ in their song-writing tactics is as sporadic and intuitional, as a serial killers dismantling their victims, with learnt precision and emotional instability; all to effect of some of the most idiosyncratic punkwork in existence.
R E P E N T
But Eugene Robinson loves this child the best. This child of his and the family of Oxbow is a screeching, rowdy, unruly, disobedient rascal. This little f u c k e r will break the drums, bite your arm and scream into your ears. This kid is a menace, he bullies other kids in school, but only those who deserve it; although who deserves it is always still up to him. He haunts foster families and correctional facilities and once robbed a guy who tried to rob him. He is a proud radical child of street-smart, highly intelligent, book-authoring abomunists (as per Bob Kaufman). This kid is trouble and his rapscallion team of thievin’, murderin’ anarchist buddies like Lydia Lunch, the provocateur extraordinaire, he brought along for the ride are none your own kids should hang out with. Heck, if the Ozzy-fearing moms whose contemporary counterparts think Kendrick Lamar is about to bring the devil into this world were to hear this, they’d probably catch a stroke. But Eugene Robinson still loves this child the best.
C O N F E S S
Here’s the matter: who is King of the Jews? Son of God, probably, with his Jesile** usurpation of Jewish tradition by imposing reformators, seizing means of theology for their gain, fathering the biggest organised bastard religion known to man. Jesile disciples proclaimed him King of the Jews, condescending and delegitimising the actual Jews. Jesus preached of love for all his children equally, look how well that turned out for him. And the hypocrite still loved some more and some less if they disobeyed slightly. The observant may notice Sammy Davis Jr. on the cover, while the curious buckaroos will find out that the popular singer converted to Judaism in early 60s, much to the confusion of both African-American and Jewish community. He became a bit of a media puppet after, getting used as the higher-up white people’s bridge to both communities: “Look, we got one of your kind on, now watch our commercials, lowlifes.”
I W A N N A B E M E
Oxbow’s particular nature in all its screeching glory is that of a provocateur, turning farce to power and profundity to profanity. Nudge a casual rock listener onto this and you’ll probably get a head scratch or two before turning it off and going to buy some headache medicine. Blistering off the starting track with Lydia Lunch disharmonically yelping over the despondent instrumentation, a statement of avant-garde destruction. If Diamanda Galas is the motherqueen of vocal witches, then Lydia Lunch is the rebellious auntie you see on holidays, provided she’s not in jail at the moment. The track squeals by like a train engine about to break down due to corporate greed and federal safety deregulations. It’s a powerful opener and a blunt statement on domestic abuse. Although specific of the lyrics are quite cryptic, a vision of a disobedient daughter adamant at wreaking havoc to get back at her parents who (mainly the father) are just as adamant to punish the child with enthusiastic hatred.
F O R G I V E M E F A T H E R F O R I H A V E S I N N E D
It is not difficult to see why one might think Oxbow are trying to make their worst record with every new effort, at least per Eugene Robinson himself.*** The swelling of the instruments into a cacophony of shapeless noises seems to be their favourite thing ever. But past that aspect, there lies not a need to shock or disarm a careful listener, but to shape something new. In no form comes a new form. In chaos and musical eccentricity rises “Bomb”, album’s second song and on paper a mild slog-down. At the surface, there seems little heads or tails to even start analysing. Robinson wails like he has a lump in his throat, operatic randomness occurs in the back, structure soon devolves into a series of loose chords, disharmonic yelps, lyrical mysteries, and unclear dirges. Indeed, one needs a particularly strong endurance to keep up with the track’s cloudiness, but in that unclarity comes a case for the whole album. Here we have a song so stereotypically morose in its execution, we (assuming I am speaking for the general conventional public) barely stop to examine. What is there to examine, after all? The random yelps, the unclear lyrics, the hostile instruments? But underneath lies dedication. These maniacs hired a string section and an operatic soprano to just lay a background greenscreen for their experimental indulgence. That is quite ridiculous. In a beautiful way.
Y O U R F A T H E R N E V E R L O V E D Y O U
The two following tracks, “Angel” and “Cat and Mouse” offer a similar experience, although spread across two vastly different tracks. “Angel” takes you on a wicked journey of patient laments, dysrhythmic piano and rhythm excursions, and Lydia Lunch drunkenly squealing s o m e t h I n g in the back. It is almost like the piano, the rhythm section, and the two vocalists separately, were never in the same room together, and recited their own severely disenchanted sermons, until all coalescing into a collapsing, intentionally messy crescendo towards the end. It is a gorgeously uneven track, so delusional in its own form, yet so profound in its own direction. Horrifyingly enough, the lyrics again delve into themes of sexual abuse, rape, perversion, saying things like “What the devil made me do what I did to you”. Perfectly unsettling.
J E S U S D I E D F O R Y O U R S I N S
Similar delinquent ugliness is built in “Cat and Mouse”, whose lyrics are not as explicit, but still scream of naughty vices. Its instrumentation, however, is like “Bomb” but in a more immediate, impactful way. Innate funky twistedness is at its core, demented by the vocal cacophony and bucket-dwelling production sound. Generally, the track list plays and expands upon these established stylistic boundaries. What one song starts, the following turns on its head, but maintaining some innate similarity. “Burn” certainly sounds and progresses a lot like “Angel” and “Bomb” but has the added layer of doom metal-like drills akin to “Cat and Mouse”. This juggling of gritty minimal noise and doomy thrashings is thrown out of balance on “Woe”, where the doom and gloom are spiced up by guitars straight out of a bluegrass jam session. It’s a sickening and rabid conclusion to the core album and works well as a recapitulation of exactly the sound that is at works with all its mild variations.
K I N G O F W H A T ?
But a question is still unanswered: What’s all this got to do with Jews or their king or anything? Well, it comes together rather loosely. It’s a provocation, much like this sort of uneasy music always is at face value. As per Robinson, the album is in essence “the second half of a suicide letter started with
F u c kfest”. To that end, those of us who already had the displeasure of reading somebody’s suicide letter can discern some familiar beats, overarching cryptic lyricism be damned. Multiple parts, especially “Daughter”, detail the background, abuse, trauma that brought about this condition and eventually this letter. But there are also gaping sections detailing descent into repetition, as a letter bogged down by a one trying to find catharsis in bleeding their agony onto a page. And all in the end is still buttressed by religious imagery. On “Burn” a lengthy monologue recounts Salome carrying the head of St. John the Baptist, a 1st century follower of the Christian God, and all its gory glory. It comes amid ponderings of various was of starting a fire, literal and figurative, and reasons for starting a fire; with gasoline or TNT, on Christmas, for God willed so. Contrast that with “Angel”, where a vision of self-destruction is also in service of some higher purpose, but dictated by the devil, since the angel did not help. This creates a narrative, where the supposed narrator, from whose perspective this suicide letter/album is written, tried salvation through God, but it failed them.
Here, with the final track “Woe”, the frame narrator juxtaposes self-hatred with perceptions of righteousness of their act. They, like Jesus, will have died for sins. Both selfishly. Both in a preventable fashion. The narrator is their own Judas and their own Roman. In this world of forced dogma deep in their throat, the lens for seeing life screwed their reality. Now that their Gods and their narratives have failed them, they latch on to death for its release and purge. They do not see to hypocrisy of suicide against the preachings of either Christianity or Judaism, for they only do as Jesus has, and they act as a good zealot should: I must rid the world of a bad follower, but what if that is me?
Let’s breathe a little here.
Oxbow may seem to be trying to make the worst music imaginable, as Robinson said himself. Confrontation and provocation are key. Even the Palo Alto studio House of Faith, where the album was recorded, is known to host a plethora of noise and counter-cultural acts, was named after a Christian community centre close by. It all serves a purpose of alienating the listener. It at first throws one off balance with the darkest of humours in its title and cover art, then spirals out of control musically to distort and discourage the listeners from further sessions, until having the courageous ones who read the lyrics be thoroughly unnerved by the imagery with blaming of blaming (or thanking) the protagonist’s suicide on religious devotion or failing thereof. One kills themselves because they are the truest King of the Jews. In this most disorienting portrayal of religious abuse and skewered self-perception one may however find solace. The band themselves certainly seem to treat this as a joke that is not supposed to be seen as a joke. They even removed a swastika off Sammy Davis’s original painting to make the allegory a little more subtle, to make it “funny without being humorous”.
It is a demented, crooked, and hostile beast. A troubled soul out for blood, whether their own or somebody else’s.
And Eugene Robinson still loves this child the best.
*https://www.vice.com/en/article/65zemq/oxbow-rank-your-records
**If adjective of penis is penile, then adjective of Jesus is Jesile.
***https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-vocalist-eugene-robinson-on-performance-chasing-perfection-and-resisting-the-need-to-explain-your-work/
