The Love Life of Adolf Hitler
OXBOW's "Love's Holiday" is a record of really good love songs for really bad people BY really bad people. But here's hoping you enjoy it just the same.
Titling something is a weird thing. On the one hand whatever you choose, while it has to speak to the product in question, it also has to adhere to what constitutes “the brand”. So, it has to deliver messages both micro and macro all while avoiding being so common as to be lifted by someone else (see: Primal Scream v. OXBOW for An Evil Heat, with The Birthday Party as source material).
Which is why, as soon as it became apparent that Thin Black Duke was not going to be the last OXBOW record ever, the wheels started turning regarding what was going to come next. And, more significantly, what it was going to be called. Call it a habit, or maybe a tradition, but like birthing infants, as was the case with all previous OXBOW records, the titles were roosting in my head, as the head lyricist, well before a lion’s share of the lyrics had been written.
This monster of a thing we’re calling Love’s Holiday though? Well, this was born a totally different way. While it’s true that we had used Love’s Holiday Orchestra to describe a project we had done back in 2007 with Stephen O’Malley, Justin Broadrick, Dave Cochrane and Chipper Nicholls, that was more a product of wanting to sit on the name. The brand, the name. An early move to plant a flag and establish ownership, the Earth, Wind & Fire song, be damned.
Love’s Holiday…a jubilee of uncomfortability around the giddy early stage, the full-bodied middle and the cursory good and bad ends of your loves supreme. And that is the shit on the end of the fork that Naked Lunch style, we’re just better off not looking at.
But it also dovetailed with a secret desire I had been harboring. A desire that had a name but that I hadn’t yet named. Specifically, how do you make music of the now/new YOU without betraying the then/old you? How do you do this…honestly?
Imagine if you would, for a second, if Motley Crue, or Van Halen or even Minor Threat were still in existence in any sort of functioning way: what would they be singing about now? This is a quandary and if they sought to harbor the concerns of their younger selves, is that the kind of pandering we could live with? Moreover, is that the kind of pandering we’re engaged in when we think about our own lives?
And finally, does rock music require the permanent cessation of now-ness to function well?
Even Mick Jagger, a sort of perennial Lazarus, has stopped trying to convince us that he’s the little red rooster, or that he’s kicking in every stall. Last time I saw Jagger, in fact, it was in some Asian fusion restaurant, where he had strategically chosen the table closest to the toilet. Just…in case, you know.
So, how do you age with your music without getting old?
Love’s Holiday was the answer. Unsparingly honest about the most recent present it complicates a conception of love that’s suffered from media abuse of any and many different varieties. From so-called “rom-com’s” to any pop song, the threadbare take is to reverse market love so that it fits nicely and neatly into packages that can comfortably be consumed by a generation of people only half paying attention.
Only half paying attention but then telling their therapists that they can’t figure out where it all went wrong.
Love’s Holiday looks into the sun of what went wrong, and sometimes what went right, for a retina scorching take on the life and times of lovers who have figured out that no matter how good something is, it will still end, because we all must end. And when we end we’re ending forever.
Well, if truth be told, it’s hard to disengage love from horror, and the better the love is the more horrible will be our remove from it.
It’s the wonderful terrible nature of life on the material plane and it’s where we are and it’s what we’re doing and if we weren’t bothered by this at 25 years old, that makes sense. If we’re not bothered by this 35 years later, that makes all the wrong kind of sense.
Reading reviewers struggle with how to listen to Love’s Holiday, or how to explain to those who are reading what’s been written and have not listened themselves yet I, as the writer of the lyrics and the singer of the songs, find myself, above all else, amused.
You see, the only critical scale that matters here is “did you like it?” We’re well beyond “is it good?” It is beyond good. It is great. But so is Hume and he bores the crap out of me.
No, “did you like it?” is what should be asked and what the reviews should try to answer since that answer sits at the nexus of the reviewer’s life, loves and limitations. In the same way that I used to hate The Smiths but then after an obsessed roommate played them to death, I gave up and gave in to what was now an appreciation because its space matched my headspace and there was no longer any sense in denying it or even trying to deny it.
This is how things work on Planet Oxbow. I can’t think of even ONE hardcore fan who started off that way. In fact, the hardcore fans usually have started off hating OXBOW. In the same way that you might hate any other bearer of uncomfortable truths.
The 10 songs on Love’s Holiday are a jubilee of uncomfortability around the giddy early stage, the full-bodied middle and the cursory good and bad ends of your loves supreme. And that is the shit on the end of the fork that Naked Lunch style, we’re just better off not looking at.
So, you might not like Love’s Holiday. But that’s not Love’s Holiday’s fault.
The good thing though is that when we went in to record it, we just didn’t record the 10 songs on it; we recorded 21 songs. The 10 songs on it were chosen and those songs chose the title Love’s Holiday. Even in the face of resistance because we had used it before.
The remaining 11 songs are at present being woven into a follow-on to Love’s Holiday. Not a sequel, necessarily, the follow-on may not include all 11 songs (some in OXBOW dispute this and say that there are only nine or 10, but I think in terms of lyrics and so there we are: I’ve written 11 lyrics) but will it be a continued meditation on love?
Well, if truth be told, it’s hard to disengage love from horror, and the better the love is the more horrible will be our remove from it. Try telling yourself “well at least you had it to enjoy while you were enjoying it” and see if that makes you feel any better about hurtling toward a cold and moldering grave cushioned by its absence.
Which is why the only title that makes sense to me for the second tranche of songs? Let’s call the shot now to forestall Primal Scream stealing it: The Love Life of Adolf Hitler.
There. We put our thumb on the scale.
Of course, this may not be the final title as OXBOW is composed of four deeply opinionated individuals with different tastes and temperaments but no matter what the title ends up being, this is the title it should be, and which you should remember if it is titled something else.
But if you don’t already own and know Love’s Holiday? Then none of this will make any sense to you now. So, what are you waiting for?
Have you pre-ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon. Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here!
You will in all likelihood get it before the August 29, 2023 release date but you’ll need to have read it before the BOOK TOUR reaches your town. Just so’s youse know what I’m talking about. Got it?
Oh, and if you plan on seeing OXBOW at any of our upcoming shows know that having the book first will be the only way to get it at shows. Getting it autographed then? Simple. Just show up at the show with it and I will accommodate.
Also here’s a surprise: Feral House is also planning on special giveaways to accompany the book. You have now been warned.