SAN FRANCISCO – With just over one week until Oxbow kicks off their European tour, the band shares a video for “The Night The Room Started Burning,” which was directed by Chris Purdie. The song appears on their new album, Love’s Holiday, out now via Ipecac Recordings.
“Lyrically it’s a purposeful take on Johnny Hartman’s ‘The Day the World Stopped Turning’ but instead of the power of love to alter our proximal relationships it’s, in my mind, all about the incendiary nature of suchlike love,” explains Eugene Robinson. “It fulfills specifically because it fills you with that which burns. And that’s something that absolutely no one slow walks.”
Niko Wenner adds: “I began the music for ‘The Night The Room Started Burning’ on my fathers old folk/classical nylon string guitar, a tune to amuse my young son. My mother played clarinet in high school but it was my father who took me to see my first string quartet concert in Seattle when I was a kid, and who inspired my love for classical music. Including, as an influence heard in this song, baroque period music. “What’s not to like about baroque music? You can dance to it, it’s got a beat!”
And you can hear the steady dance rhythm in Room Burning. And a bit of baroque style in the way the guitar line sounds like two voices in a call and response, first higher “bah bah dee bah dee dee,” and the second, lower, answering the first and going down “BAH BAH BAH.” And of course the choir. The elephant in the room here is the guy whose name we should never speak in the same breath as our own, from humility, and respect. I’ll only say that the devine music of baroque composer J.S. Bach would by itself seem to prove the existence of what for lack of a better word, we call God. Q.E.D.? FIIK.”
European tour dates
September 1 Glasgow, UK Broadcast
September 2 Birmingham, UK Supersonic Festival
September 3 Leeds, UK Brudenell Social Club
September 4 Bristol, UK Exchange
September 5 London, UK Studio 9294
September 6 Kortrijk, BE Wilde Western
September 7 Brussels, BE Botanique
September 8 Nijmegen, NL Merleyn
September 9 Tetange, LU Human’s World Festival (free entry)
September 10 Bochum, DE Die Trompete
September 11 Vienna, AT Volkstheatre Rote Bar
September 12 Wroclaw, PL Liverpool
September 13 Warsaw, PL Hydrozagadka
September 14 Berlin, DE Roadrunners Paradise
September 15 Hamburg, DE Hafenklang
September 16 Aalborg, DK Lasher Fest
U.S. Tour Dates:
October 20 Philadelphia, PA PhilaMOCA
October 21 Portland, ME SPACE
October 22 Brooklyn, NY Elsewhere
November 9 San Francisco, CA Great American Music Hall
November 10 Los Angeles, CA Regent Theatre
November 11 Mesa, AZ Pub Rock
Love’s Holiday cover by Aaron Turner
Love’s Holiday is available now with the collection available on various limited-edition vinyl variants, as well as standard vinyl, CD and digital: https://oxbow.lnk.to/love. OXBOW previously released four videos in the lead up to the album’s release: “Lovely Murk (ft. Lingua Ignota),” “Dead Ahead,” “Icy White & Crystalline,” and “1000 Hours.”
OXBOW is Dan Adams (electrical/acoustic bass), Greg David (drums/percussion), Eugene S. Robinson (vocals), and Niko Wenner (guitars/pianos). The San Francisco-born band have released seven studio albums since their inception in 1988, with Pitchfork saying the foursome have released “some of the most eccentric heavy music albums ever.”
