Oxbow is one of the rare bands that exhibits such a glacial lack of compromise, from the start settling into a style that's harsh at best, and using music outside of their bubble as base componentry rather than outright influence. Never "metal" but nearly always "heavy,” Oxbow knows its history, having used blues conventions as crude scaffolds for cerebral noise rock of the most disturbing order. But if it's at all a hidden agenda of Oxbow's to destroy, or at least disfigure, "the blues" in order to save it, The Narcotic Story brings them one step closer to fruition. A vestige of the blues – of the sort evocative of some stinking deep-south abattoir – remains. But the record's eight songs are imbued with a desperate, film-noir quality, emphasizing orchestration beyond guitar, bass and drums. The band flirted with similar textures on 2002's An Evil Heat, but here there's less reliance on the typically "heavy.” The occasionally mathy Zeppelin riffs that stumble and slide, and stop-and-start rhythms are in shorter supply overall; the metal has largely been smelted out in favor of tension. Toggling between dissimilar themes over the course of the longer pieces continues to be an Oxbow hallmark, perhaps in more of a traditional fashion than a sudden edit-like jump. The transitions between the delicate and the bludgeoning are allowed to develop less jarringly in dynamic-laden numbers like "Time Gentlemen Time" and "A Winner Every Time.”
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