#oxbow

Oxbow.

Four years ago, Scott Kelly, one of three co-founders of the band Neurosis, set it all aflame via a public admission that he abused his wife and his daughter and had been doing so for years while telling lies about it and weaponizing his mental illness in order to continue doing so. This marked his retirement from public life. It also shitcanned the band by both blind siding them and making continuing almost an impossibility.

So the entirety of a 41-year career of music that carved the best pieces of hardcore, metal, and post-punk into a fairly unique amalgam of heaviness screeched to a halt. It’s one thing to want to kill yourself but to stake in the heart the creative endeavors of five other people, is a murder-suicide for the ages.

Of course nothing lasts forever, outside of what we imagine for our deathless art, so death, disease claims us all, but that’s organic. What’s inorganic? That through the singular efforts of a single member everything can be…finished.

But my great-grandmother had a saying — “One monkey don’t stop no show” — that echoed in my head as I tried to imagine how Neurosis could save Neurosis.

Up around the third floor back

And back up in the fucking ink

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