Oxbow Love's Holiday LP

"I've always been chagrined that no one understood that our songs were love songs," Oxbow vocalist and lyricist Eugene Robinson says while reflecting on the band's output from the last 35 years. Love may not have been the most obvious muse in their earlier work, but the subject has never been more apparent than on their eighth studio album and first new music in six years, Love's Holiday. "But now, listening to a record of exclusively love songs, I can see how no one saw that," Robinson admits. "My problem is how I think about love, as this affects how I feel about it, instead of the other way around."

The band again worked with Grammy-winning engineer and co-producer Joe Chiccarelli (White Stripes, My Morning Jacket). Love's Holiday is the third Oxbow album recorded with Chiccarelli, and the band members uniformly state that their trust in him allowed the album to venture into even more inviting directions

Oxbow was born when Robinson enlisted the help of Niko Wenner, guitarist and bandmate from the shape-shifting Bay Area punk band Whipping Boy, for a recording project. Robinson had a diaristic examination of the fallout from "a relationship that involved infidelity, attempted murder, robbery, extortion and sex addiction" that needed instrumentation. Harnessing the force of their hardcore and metal past while employing the arch forms of classical music, the improvisational forays of jazz, and the adventurism of experimental music, classically trained Wenner created a sonic bedrock for Robinson's anguished howls and seething croons. Further bolstered by the agile and off-kilter rhythm section of Greg Davis (drums) and Dan Adams (bass), Oxbow spent the next three decades fusing traditional music forms with the less refined and often transgressive approaches of late-20th century subterranean movements. The balance of these opposing forces has been continually recalibrated over the years, but the band has never leaned so heavily into the harmonious side of their sound as they have on Love's Holiday.