Oxbow - The Night The Room Started Burning

From the new album, Love’s Holiday, out now. Directed by Chris Purdie “Lyrically it’s a purposeful take on Johnny Hartman’s ‘The Day the World Stopped Turning’ but instead of the power of love to alter our proximal relationships it’s, in my mind, all about the incendiary nature of suchlike love. It fulfills specifically because it fills you with that which burns. And that’s something that absolutely no one slow walks.” - Eugene Robinson Niko Wenner comments, “I began the music for “The Night The Room Started Burning” on my fathers old folk/classical nylon string guitar, a tune to amuse my young son. My mother played clarinet in high school but it was my father who took me to see my first string quartet concert in Seattle when I was a kid, and who inspired my love for classical music. Including, as an influence heard in this song, baroque period music. “What’s not to like about baroque music? You can dance to it, it’s got a beat!” Wenner continues, “And you can hear the steady dance rhythm in ...Room Burning. And a bit of baroque style in the way the guitar line sounds like two voices in a call and response, first higher “bah bah dee bah dee dee,” and the second, lower, answering the first and going down “BAH BAH BAH.” And of course the choir. The elephant in the room here is the guy, baroque composer J.S. Bach, whose name we should never speak in the same breath as our own, from humility, and respect. Enjoy.“ OXBOW is Dan Adams (electrical/acoustic bass), Greg Davis (drums/percussion), Eugene S. Robinson (vocals), and Niko Wenner (guitars/pianos). The 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.”