[photo by Nikolaj Bransholm]
Decibel Magazine is now streaming “Birthday Song” by Aarhus, Denmark-based avant-hardcore outfit OXX. The new single strikes as the band’s new LP, The Skeleton Is Just A Coat Hanger; These Are The Black Strings That Make You Dance, nears August release through Nefarious Industries. The band’s first US tour is also being booked in conjunction with the album’s release.
The Skeleton Is Just A Coat Hanger; These Are The Black Strings That Make You Dance, was recorded by OXX, mixed by Klaus “Q” Hedegaard, mastered by ET Mastering, with artwork by Aske A. Hvidtfeldt, photography by Malte Riis, and design by Greg Meisenberg.
The members of OXX offer on the LP’s first single, “‘Birthday Song’ is a song about birthdays. It was the first song written for the record, and as it turns out, just spazmodic and hectic enough that it manages to briefly round the corners of most of the musical and lyrical themes of the auditive clusterfuck that is The Skeleton… As is the case for most of the lyrics on the record, ‘Birthday Song’ is an attempt at devising an appropriate/satisfactory literary vehicle for issues of a psychiatric, psycho-social and existential nature. For reasons too lengthy and self-indulgent to list, a weird kind of meta-text, and an equally fucked up sense of spatiality became the two most prominent lyrical currents of the record. Staircases, graves, and open vistas interweave in a distorted Escheresque hellscape, all in the midst of a text collapsing on itself….
But fuck that pretentious shit. This is a song mostly about birthdays and insanity, but a bit about Swedish discus thrower Ricky Bruch as well. It fucking rips, and the drums go boom super-fast and super-slow, there’s riffs of both the sludgy and the mathy variety, screams and growls and yells and fucking saxophones!”
The Decibel write-up offers in part, “For a band to title its latest record The Skeleton is Just A Coat Hanger; These Are The Black Strings That Make You Dance, well, you gotta think they’re either existing in a completely different universe and playing on a separate astral plane than most of the rest of us, or they’re just not playing with a full deck. So, there you have it: that’s the title of the forthcoming album by this trio from Aarhus, Denmark and aside from strangely reminding me of my father’s favorite way to insult me when I was a kid (‘Why don’t you use your head for something other than a hat rack?’), it’s also a title that denotes some of the craziest avant-extreme metallic hardcore in recent memory.”
Stream OXX’s “Birthday Song” at Decibel Magazine RIGHT HERE.
Nefarious Industries will release The Skeleton Is Just A Coat Hanger; These Are The Black Strings That Make You Dance on LP and digital platforms on August 16th. Find preorders at the label webshop HERE and Bandcamp HERE.
OXX is currently booking the band’s first US tour, which will follow shortly after the release of the new album. Watch for the early fall routing to be posted in the days ahead, alongside additional audio and video previews from the album.
OXX is shamelessly doing whatever pleases them. The band been working toward an auditory mindfuck since 2012. All three members of OXX have previously been active in both the Danish punk/metal scene and heaps of weird shit such as avant/free music, afrobeat, and film scoring. Originally formed to bridge the gap between these seemingly disparate genres, the band has since grown into a feral beast of its own. Ripping feverishly through math, noise, sludge, crust, avant-garde, and whichever other subgenre of extreme music imaginable. One might perhaps call it clusterfuck-core, but if that’s hard to picture, try getting blackout drunk and beating yourself to death with a Thomas Pynchon door stopper; that should put you in the ballpark.
On their newest release, The Skeleton Is Just A Coat Hanger; These Are The Black Strings That Make You Dance, OXX pushes their genre schizophrenia to its painstaking limits. Eschewing click-tracks, endless overdubbing, and micro-managing, the album is the sound of a cathartic, organic explosion bereft of glossy production and studio fuckery. The raw, spontaneous sound of the record acts as an extension of the lyrics; an unfiltered, feverish stream of thought – bits and pieces of novels, obscure cinema, videogames, and more, all rushing by in a maelstrom of impressions of existence filtered through the eyes of the thoroughly unstable.
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