Oxford Collapse
Remember the Night Parties
SubPop Records

There was a time, at least 15 years ago, when children who were weaned on ridiculous ’70s hard rock and ’80s hair metal went to college. There they had their eyes opened by groups like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. and decided that they really didn’t need to shred, but could instead detune their guitars and try to be a little more melodic and artsy. Best of all, they could still rock out. It’s that kind of thinking that spawned some of the best bands of the indie music explosion of the mid to late ’90s from Superchunk and Archers of Loaf to Hum and Lotion. 

Considering the explosion of bands influenced mainly by hip-hop and dance music that are currently clogging up the drain of the music scene, it would have been fair to guess that the prototypical style of “indie rock” as we once knew it was probably dead and gone. Not so, if Oxford Collapse has anything to say about it. Their Sub Pop debut is the group’s third full-length album after spending years honing their craft on a number of smaller labels. The mega-indie from Seattle couldn’t have picked a better time to snatch this band up as they are in peak form on this album, gushing with guitar majesty and the pitch perfect strain of front man Michael Pace’s vocals.

One of the highest compliments I can give this record is to note how gloriously unfunky it is. The group plays it straight, showing that there is still something grand to be wrenched out of the age old verse-chorus-verse structure. In an era when so many young musicians are ready to throw out their guitars in favor of laptops, cowbells or synthesizers, it’s almost a revolutionary act to play rock music as poker faced as Oxford Collapse does.

The x-factor for this group is their bass player. Adam Rizer has an incredible ability to slink through a song like Tortoise’s Doug McCombs adding a second or third hook to a song and is able to ratchet up the intensity with the throttling attack of a player like Steve Popson from Polvo. These songs would quickly fall to pieces if someone was wasting the band’s time aping the guitar line or adding nothing more than a 4/4 throb.

The centerpiece of the album is “The Return of the Burno” which effortlessly burns for eight minutes. It starts off innocently enough with a high-hat wash and some restrained plucking on both guitar and bass, but quickly starts overlaying jagged chords and Pace’s agonized vocal lines. The band could have kept this up for the rest of the song, but instead start stripping things away, allowing the bass to take the lead and leaving the guitars to add little splashes of color and mood using both buzzing feedback and glistening chords. Although this word gets overused, the song feels epic even when they aim at an understated mood. Elsewhere the band affects a Neutral Milk Hotel-like shuffle (“In Your Volcano”) and bristling power pop (“Loser City”) to equally bracing effect.

There’s a part of me that sincerely hopes that a record this good would spark the indie music scene to return to their guitar heavy days of yore, but that might just be the nostalgic part of my brain kicking in. Instead, I’ll just have to hope that there are one or two scrappy bands that will hear this and will be given some encouragement that their nascent musical efforts aren’t pointless. And I’ll be perfectly content to wait for their records to hit the streets. And I’ll have the brilliant Oxford Collapse record to keep me company while I wait.

MP3
Please Visit Your National Parks

Website
http://www.oxfordcollapse.com
http://www.myspace.com/theoxfordcollapse