OXBOW
An evil heat
CD, Neurot
“One
Sunday morning the preacher went a-trawling / to the House of Fuck he come
a-calling / ‘Love the sinner and scorn the Sin! Now goddam ya-let me
in!”
Oh
boy, what an evil bastard of a record! I didn’t even know Oxbow still
existed, but they must have survived in some evil cellar, breathing the
fumes of evil dreams, bad lives and even worse people. And they took their
time to record one complex motherfucker of twisted neuroses and psychotic
ramblings. This is definitely not fit for lazy Sunday afternoons or sunny
days at the beach. The instruments stumble along some acid-ridden melody
like a drunken Vietnam vet on a rainy New York-street, who mumbles to
himself: “Chambers off east to East Broadway, where the hell is everything
gone?” Hell, nobody cares in this medieval fuckfest of hidden brutality
and narcotic love-murder.
Did
you know that if you drive off east from Manhattan through the Queens Tunnel
and then go east on Hwy 495 for about one and a half hours your gonna reach
a clifted, weather-ridden oceanside called Great Peconic Bay. If you ride on
some more, out to the most eastern end of Long island, you’ll reach a
godforsaken place called Gardiners Bay. Here long stretches of dark green
woods and rocky cliffs, born from the unforgiving cold ocean, have removed
the cemented pathways of the city. Civilisation is still around the bend,
but you get the feeling that you have somehow moved to far to ever go back
again. And if you went onto the upper leg of the two outstretches of Long
Island, then you can drive out to the furthest point of this lonely place,
which is called Orient Point. And from there you can see Plum Island. But
you won’t be able to set foot on Plum Island because that is where the
“Plum Island Animal Disease Center” is located. That is where the USofA
keeps animals that breed rare or unknown sicknesses. Imagine long rows of
cold steel-cages, in all sizes and outfits, able to house all the different
animals god has created. From cows and other farm-animals, who are
transported onto this island, because they’ll pose a threat to the
farm-industry of whole counties and federals states, up to all sorts of
exotic animals that somebody tried to smuggle into this land but didn’t
make it. Federal agents storming into motel rooms to find a male body
bloated up and already rotting from the inside, bitten by the poisonous
snakes he tried to sell. Or a deadly spider as big as the foot of a grown
man. Or a leguan sitting in a half-full bathtub filled with brown water,
unable to get out, but still hanging on to his life in this very weird and
alien surrounding. A porcupine half-burned in a car-accident, where some
city-dweller tried to take it home, because it looks funny. But it got loose
during the drive and jumped into the driver’s lap, afraid, stinging him
with claws and teeth. Now imagine the little whelping sounds a small dog,
found on the streets of a suburb on Long Island and taken away because now
owner could be found and some veterinary made a strange diagnosis, when he
reaches this place. It is easy to imagine horrors like that, when listening
to “an evil heat”.
