Experimental rock band Oxbow announce the release of their first album in ten years, ‘Thin Black Duke‘, the follow-up to 2007’s ‘The Narcotic Story‘. Speaking last year on the new album, vocalist Eugene Robinson said: “We got Joe Chiccarelli who produced the last one [The Narcotic Story, Nuerot] to produced this one. He bumped us down the schedule. It’s taken close to ten years now because he was doing stuff with Jack White – so he bumped us. He did the Morrissey record – so he bumped us. He did Alanis Morissette – so he bumped us. And that was a bitter pill to swallow. I don’t mind being bumped for Jack White or Morrissey but Alanis Morissette? So he finished recording and mixing the record and then we did something that Oxbow has never done before, we auditioned five different mastering people and sent them all thirty second segments of all of the songs and then we had an incredible listening party where we listened to all of them blind and ranked them all.“
He also shared that the band decided on two different mastering engineers for the album: one for the digital release and another for the vinyl. “It’s the end of a song cycle for us and after Thin Black Duke we’re going to do something completely different.” Guitarist Niko Wenner on ‘Thin Black Duke‘: “For this record I wanted to go even further in the way we always make recordings, as music that hangs together over an entire album, ‘large scale coherence’ if you will. I was inspired by pieces like Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the formal technique in classical music where a small idea, a kernel, is reiterated, morphed, expanded and truncated, to make a piece of music permeated with the potent perfume of that small element.” The new release will come out May 5th via Hydra Head Records, former Isis frontman Aaron Turner’s label, and will be the first material out on the label since 2013.
Sarah Medeiros