Love's Holiday - 2023 US Ipecac Recordings Red Vinyl 9-track LP

The inimitable four-piece OXBOW announce their first new music in six years with the anticipated release of Love’s Holiday.Previous OXBOW albums found their impetus in a lyrical framework provided by Robinson, with Wenner applying his musical compositions to the singer’s narratives. However, Love’s Holiday began with the music.One of the more apparent manifestations of this new approach is the orchestration on Love’s Holiday. OXBOW has often employed auxiliary instrumentation as an addendum to the guitars on their recordings, but this time around, human voices are the primary addition. Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota) lends her soaring, operatic vocals to “Lovely Murk,” while the layered choral bed of “1000 Hours” was provided by Roger Joseph Manning Jr (Jellyfish/Beck). The album also features a 15-person choir plus strings, oboe, flute, and clarinet.For the differences in the process, Love’s Holiday is still very much an OXBOW album. Across its 10 tracks, Love’s Holiday feels feverish, disorienting, hostile, beguiling, defeated, and triumphant.he 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.”

Tracklisting.

1.Dead Ahead
2.Icy White & Crystalline
3.Lovely Murk
4.1000 Hours
5.All Gone
6.The Night the Room Started Burning
  
Side 2. 
1.Million Dollar Weekend
2.The Second Talk
3.Gunwale