Oxbow

For more than 20 years, Eugene Robinson has thrilled and occasionally brutalized audiences as the leader of the hardcore art-rock outfit Oxbow. In fact, for much of the San Francisco band’s career, Robinson’s reputation as a provocateur garnered more attention than the music, a pungent concoction of metal, jazz, blues and noise-rock that splits the difference between Black Sabbath and Captain Beefheart. Like David Yow of the Jesus Lizard, Robinson is known for shedding clothes onstage, baring the formidably muscled frame of a competitive fighter. Like Michael Gira of Swans, his singing is miasmic and expresses various shades of nausea. And like almost no one else in hardcore music, he’s black, which adds an electric racial tension to the oppositional stance he affects toward his audience.

But with their most recent album, 2007’s The Narcotic Story, Oxbow began softening their anarchic edge to produce their most considered and polished recording yet. It wasn’t that they’d lost their fury—while the 40-something, Stanford-educated Robinson had settled into a mild-mannered day-job as a computer magazine editor, his willingness to meet any physical challenge from his audience remained firm. But The Narcotic Story sublimated a lot of Oxbow’s bludgeoning blues into sumptuous, even sweet tangles of guitar and waves of strings. It was some of the most elegantly dilapidated rock music this side of pacesetting deconstructionists U.S. Maple. The lyrics, moaned and gurgled, seemed even more twisted in that context.

Oxbow had learned the power of the whisper in their chosen domain, horror—but when they play live, they still know how to unleash a terrifying roar. You’ll be fine unless you act like a jerk. Word of advice? Just don’t. —Brian Howe