Metro Pulse/Music/Oxes

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What:
Oxes

When:
Saturday, Sept. 8 at 9 p.m.

Where:
The Pilot Light

Cost:
$5

The Oxes collectively journey down their separate paths

by Matthew T. Everett

A live performance by the Oxes is more guerrilla theater than rock show. Part of that is the music itself; the Oxes play brutally hard instrumental rock at punishing volumes, with off-kilter rhythms and bizarre, angular time changes that keep the most astute listener off balance. But the form of an Oxes show challenges the audience just as much as the noise produced there. The band starts off its shows with the three members standing on top of big black boxes made of wood. Soon, though, guitarists Natalio Fowler and Marc Miller are running amok through the crowd in a spectacle that's equal parts confrontation and audience participation.

"It's a half hour of running around and hearing the craziest rock music in the world and sweating, getting in the audience and trying to make people act in ways they normally wouldn't act in a show situation," says drummer Christopher Freeland of his Baltimore, Maryland-based band.

There's a certain intellectual rigor to the Oxes' methods. Their performances are entirely post-modern, emphasizing and then obliterating the distinction between performer and audience. But Freeland says an Oxes show isn't so much about exploring an academic point as it's about offering something new.

"A regular show is boring for us," he says. "The whole medium of playing live, bands playing live, generally isn't interesting. There's no point unless you do something extra. One thing we all agree about is that we don't want to be doing the same thing all the time."

That attitude extends into the studio, as well. So far the band has only recorded a handful of independent label singles and last year's full-length release, The Oxes, but they've captured a combination of energy and intelligence that few bands can match. Drawing on the influence of post-hardcore bands like Fugazi and adding a dose of metal swagger, the Oxes are phenomenally noisy. At the same time, they keep the typical excesses of heavy music—male bravado and aggressive posturing—in check, and broaden the horizons of hard rock with endless experimentation. The Oxes is a long stream of dashed expectations, wherein punk and metal clichés are set up and then exploded with an unexpected retreat into noisy free-form jamming or quiet, subdued interludes. Add the fact that their music is entirely instrumental, and an Oxes performance becomes almost a dare to the listener.

"It's unfortunate that punk has two meanings," Freeland says. "One means thinking for yourself, fuck the system and do whatever you want to do. The other is about strict conformity, where you have three-chord songs and you have to wear this and we don't like these other groups of people. The two are exactly opposed, but they go by the same words. It's just whether you want to be open-minded or closed-minded...One of the best things I saw in my life was a college punk show just a few weeks ago. It was in a dorm room, and they weren't supposed to have it, and the campus cops were already there telling them that if they went on they'd shut it down. They went ahead and did it, and they got two songs into it before the cops stopped it. It was just a wonderful illustration of punk versus the system."

As if to prove his point that everything should be new all the time, Freeland says the Oxes are trying to recruit a singer. They'll be recording their second album during a break on their current seven-week tour, highlighting "the theme of a digital hippie," whatever that means. After that they could be heading in an entirely new direction. "We're looking for a singer right now," Freeland says. "There's a woman named Alice in France, and she might be the one. So this kind of might be our last instrumental album. Once you add vocals it becomes something else. Instrumental music is so open."

Part of the reason that the Oxes' music is so wide open is that all three members contribute equally, and in fact often go in three different directions at once. "We don't sit around at practice and say, 'We should go here musically,'" Freeland says. "We talk very little about what we want to do. We just bring all our influences to the table. We all three want to go somewhere individually, and our separate paths take us there collectively."