XBXRX

Smart Savages on a Sugar Fix

originally published July 18, 2007

The members of XBXRX moved from Mobile, AL, to Oakland, CA, a few years back, and one can easily hazard why: at some point during their long musical rearing, they must’ve encountered some serious vibration-difficulty amidst such stilted, swamp-thick air. In this particular interview I read, though, the band chalks their retreat up to Mobile’s distinct lack of progressive-benchmark municipal programs, and what this deficit signifies in terms of the place’s wholesale psyche. The dudes cited recycling as the reason, and I’m sure this was part of it, but I know the real truth: they must’ve found it hard to sideways-boogie, spazz-out drool and basically wreck shit amid the Dorian columns and historically-important shipyards of their old hometown.

XBXRX don’t write songs as much as they hatch these minute parcels of dense kinesis in order to demolish them; when they start, they start from the middle-peak of pure energy and continue it until the exhaustion-point - theirs and yours. Imagine if some kid took all those Gravity Records 7" releases from the early '90s and rode a roofing-tack willy-nilly over the snore-inducing artsy-slow parts and then got wasted on Sparks, shuffled them to the floor, and then tried to spin them for you for about 15 minutes until he had to sprint off to piss. No, I promise, it’s THAT GOOD!

I saw them play once, at a record store, years ago. I missed the entire first third of their set, because I was outside smoking a single cigarette. Through the plate glass, though, it sounded like the very first edition of Gang Green murdering Rick Moranis with an enormous Dremel tool. I crushed out my Doral and stepped into the tumult: they were all over the place, these spike-thin nerds barely old enough to drive, leaping and seizuring and spitting and back-bending. Guitarist sounded like a Toyota Corolla with a broken clutch. Rhythm section: a pointillistic stutter shifting suddenly to free-skronk blur. And the vocals weren’t the declamatory-important punk-rock standard-issue; rather, they came across as purely agonized: sounded like someone being pressed in a junkyard carcrusher.

I was digging it great, and then the ultimate signifier of their sincerity occurred: the guitarist smashed his vintage Silvertone guitar, and this was no typical now-as-then-codified-by-Cobain-cum-Townshend rock maneuver. The kid did it by accident - shattered the stylish headstock on the store’s linoleum while he thrashed on his back like a porpoise - and was deeply bummed, I could tell. He kept trying to play the ruined thing as best he could for the three-minute remainder of the set, stretching the strings with his fret-hand and bashing away, then, overcome with inefficacy, screaming bloodyfuckingmurder into the pickups. Whole thing resembled a sugar-high child showing off for some guests with a cartwheel and invariably pulverizing an heirloom lamp with his now-wronged noggin; it was all there: the misplaced energy, the regrettable destruction of precious things and the inevitable ebullience of true emotion in the name of loss and physical pain.

But here’s the kicker: the kid was moved to such mindless heights of deliverance and motion during the performance that this sort of thing was possible. And bear in mind the atmosphere: fluorescent track-lighting, for-sale CD-racks, maybe 10 half-curious people in the crowd that night. If this one small, underpopulated show stands as an indicator of the conviction and fury they evince every night in the name of sheer catharsis, I can surely imagine how much is left in ruins, physically and otherwise. And I can understand why a tenure in a place like Mobile, where this sort of years-long musical and attitudinal presence is tantamount to screaming at a scalloped wall of polished granite, would prove to be psychically exhausting in the utmost: flat-out discouraging as a useless guitar, nevertheless plugged-in and amped-up.

So they’ve relocated to the more-permissive East Bay area, and the growth shows up in their tuneage; they’ve released two records since the move, both on the esteemed Polyvinyl label: 2005’s Sixth in Sixes and the more-recent Wars. Compared to earlier output, both records flash a greater awareness of up-down dynamics; where they once channeled the unrelenting ire and bile of Void and the obtuse, sawed-off qualities of the early Black Dice, they’ve now added a greater sense of structure. Emerging from the roiling textures are song-ish blasts of heavy metal, burst veins of lysergic guitar interplay, recognizably rhythmic drumbeats and, at times, moments of almost-straight lyrical articulation. Actually, as far as their extra-musical discourse goes - their trip - they seem to have converted their unstoppably devious energy into a concrete socio-political worldview, and, alongside, have deepened their disquieting sonic lexicon to harmonize with their grave cosmology.

“Humanity has done a good job at trying to destroy the human race,” they state in an interview with the Agouti Music website, “and ultimately it will prove to be the death of the human race.” They proceed: “The religious zealots/extremists that run our country believe that Armageddon is a big part of their fairy tale fantasy, so they have no problem speeding the destruction and wiping us out. It’s sad, and the bitter punchline is that we’re all going to meet the same fate.”

Normally, I chafe at such a suremindedly cataclysmic overview, especially one cribbed from such an interview, where, doubtlessly, these harrowing sentences hummed across a cup of a fair-trade coffee, brimmed with soymilk, sitting atop some faux-painted café table. I mean, the world’s ending and you’ve even gone so far as to name a responsible party, so what the fuck are you gonna do about it? You play in a rock band, and good for you, but given the dedication implicit to maintaining a rock band in the real world, I know you don’t have the time to, you know, chain yourself to a bulldozer and put a spike in a tree and row your boat into the barge-choked Northern Sea, now do you?

However, with these XBXRX chaps, I believe 'em. Given their obvious progressions, it seems the band has found a personal solution to all this abounding doom: “we live for the moment,” they say “and approach our last days with gusto.” They put their heads down and create, remain positive, forge onward. And so, this scrambled dark soothsaying proves not to be so much of a selling-point or a stumbling-block for XBXRX, but rather, a prime motivator: their overkinetic minds have finally gained freedom and thusly found purchase in a vision of a future that, to this writer, doesn’t seem all that inconceivable. Their muse is imminent apocalypse, the oncoming obliteration of everything.

They sing to our surely-marred future, and they sure as hell sound like it, and when they come, they’re gonna come at you like some Lord of the Flies characters that caught some Chomsky and climbed into the Pixie-stix, and you should be there cause it’s gonna flat rule over Fantasy Metal Mark 5 or the 125,666th love song you’ve heard since late April.

Jim McHugh

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. Interested in contributing a piece? Contact music editor Chris Hassiotis at music@flagpole.com.