King of the Jews

There's very little for us, the assembled OXBOW, in consideration of past historical fact, that's created as great a sense of disturbance at best or feelings of careerist concern at worst, as this, the creation of this record, the King of the Jews. While those more professionally minded industry folks in our midst fret over the slumping that is sometimes an inevitable part of sophomore outings, this was really the last of our artistic concerns. Moving beyond the ill-intentioned and well-delivered suicide note that was our debut, Fuckfest, the struggle was not to create a record that was "crazier" than the first, there was no effort afoot to exceed the first's excess in a way that played off of our more "charming" elements and continue the sales cavalcade that failed to materialize in actual fact. No. The effort here was, despite diversion aplenty, to dig our knuckles deeply into what we were trying to say the first time but failed to deliver on, in our eyes, both musically and production-wise, and most certainly lyrically and graphically [which is to say, on a certain level, thematically]. Of course this is all just police blotter stuff. Concrete and organized detail that does not address at all the unspecified disasters hinted at in the lyrics. Lyrics that touch on my personal move from thinking that suicide was a workable solution to a much more practical understanding of life at hand that's remained today and that's that as much and as many problems as suicide might solve, there are still plenty of people who deserve to die more than I do. In the end? Homicide seemed a much better solution and one which I was probably much more functionally suited for. This record marks that very personal shift in me moving from feeling sorry for myself toward me feeling sorry for you, mor more precisely: the not-so-comfortable transition from being a danger to self to being a danger to others.

--Eugene S. Robinson