#oxeneers

Oxeneers or The Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home, the first album by my old band These Arms Are Snakes, turns ten years old this month. I mention this not because I think the album deserves some sort of commemorative treatment, but because it seems really strange that an entire decade has passed since this record came out. I remember buying albums by Dead Kennedys and Minutemen back in ’91 and thinking that they were relics from another era. Dead Kennedys had only broken up five years prior and D. Boon had passed away at the tail end of ’85, but to a thirteen-year-old, that seemed like a whole generation ago.

Obviously, the older we get the shorter a year feels in relation to our age. Ten years doesn’t seem as near infinite now as it does when you’re eight years old and grappling with the distance of high school graduation. But for me, there is some sort of significance to a piece of music being a decade old. I tend to think of different eras of music falling into neatly packaged intervals of decades. It’s sort of stupid, I realize. Nothing changes on the cusp of a new year, but it’s still kind of strange how apt the decade designations wind up being when we discuss certain genres of music. There’s a huge difference between ‘60s rock and ‘70s rock, ‘70s punk and ‘80s punk, ‘80s hardcore and ’90 hardcore, and, in this case, ‘90s post-hardcore and post-hardcore in the new millennium. While These Arms Are Snakes really resented being lumped in with “post-hardcore”, it would be foolish to deny being a part of it. And yet, after recently listening back to this record, I was a bit relieved by how well it’s aged. You spend your twenties cringing over decisions you made in your teenage years and you spend your thirties embarrassed by your twenties, so I was ready to cringe while listening to Oxeneers. But as I mentioned at the beginning of the post, it’s hard to believe this record is a decade old. It still feels very contemporary to me for some reason. And my memories of making the record are remarkably clear.

A few bits of trivia I remember about Oxeneers:

Shit Sisters: This is one of the first songs we wrote for the album and I don’t think there was ever a show where we didn’t play it live. Though Erin Tate played drums on the album, this song was written with our original drummer Joe Preston (note: not the Joe Preston of Thrones/Melvins/Harvey Milk fame). The title is a reference to the movie Sleepaway Camp 2. I have no idea why.

Angela’s Secret: This is another one that we played at pretty much every show. Steve referred to it as our "Blood Brothers song", maybe because the keyboard line makes it sound like a more rudimentary take on “Cicilia and the Silhouette Saloon”. I always thought it was a bit more of a rip-off of “It’s Catching Up” by Nomeansno, mainly because both songs have a middle section where the bass rides one high note while the guitar carries the riff underneath it. Erin and I were big fans of the Canadian group, and we often used Ryan and Steve’s lack of familiarity with them as an excuse to lift ideas from their catalog. Steve suggested the title, which is another Sleepaway Camp reference. I learned later that Blood Brothers’ song “Meet Me At The Water Front After The Social” was a Sleepaway Camp reference too. So maybe this really was our “Blood Brothers” song.

Big News: The initial writing process for our songs didn’t often include every member of the band. Sometimes Steve would be absent. Sometimes whoever was drumming at the time and I would flesh out a structure to the song before Ryan came on board. There were even a few songs where Ryan and I would piece together a song without drums (“Subtle Body”, “Seven Curtains”, and “Mescaline Eyes” were written that way). But “Big News” is the only song where I wasn’t around for the initial writing process. This was “the single” off the album.

Tracing Your Pearly Whites: We played this one a few times early on in the band’s existence, but we had almost completely phased it out of our sets by the time the record came out. I remember we played this song first at a show where the guys from Jade Tree Records came out to see us and they grumbled that we hadn’t started the set with a song off our demo, even though at that point we had no music available to the public.

Gadget Arms: Jade Tree wanted to cut this song from the record and have it as a bonus track for the Japanese license of the album. The song is a play off of Mark from Blood Brother’s last name (Gajadhar). He played auxiliary drums on this one. Other guest appearances here include Dave Knudson and Demian Johnston on guitar, Ben Verellen on bass, and Ryan’s older brother Derik flipping a light switch and spraying a can of Lysol. Also of note, the main guitar line is an accidental note for note rip-off of VSS’s “Sibling Ascending”. Oops.

Greetings From The Great North Woods: This was originally supposed to be the opening track of the album. We were all super-pumped on it when we wrote it and it seemed to go over particularly well with audiences as we were leading up to the recording session. But for whatever reason we didn’t really manage to capture the spirit of the song, and I think it came across a little flat and lifeless on the record. We relegated it to the latter half of the record, but we probably should’ve just cut it completely.

La Stanza Bianca: We called this song “White Room”, but for some reason we opted to list the track as “La Stanza Bianca”, which was a completely incorrect Spanish interpretation. I always thought the main keyboard line sounded like the theme from Gremlins.

Darlings of New Midnight: We played this one live quite a bit, and fucked up the drum break around half of the time.

Oxeneer: Steve made this track on his computer. He’s reading a diary entry from one of his relatives detailing the events of their house burning down. 

Idaho: We named this song “Idaho” because both Ryan and I played keyboards, so we thought of it as the twin keyboard song. Then it became “Twins”, then it became “Twin Falls”, then it became “Twin Falls, Idaho”, then finally just “Idaho”. I always loved playing this song, though I wish the bass dive was a little louder in the mix and had some side-chain compression on it so that it sounded like the bass dives on the Shizuo album. Still probably one of my favorite tracks by the band.

Other random factoids: Jade Tree hated the initial mix of this record, though we found out later that they first listened to it on a set of mono computer speakers. We got more complaints about the nudity in the artwork for Oxeneers than complaints about the artwork for This Is Meant To Hurt You, because apparently photos of penises are more offensive than pictures of women tied up with Christmas lights. I wanted to name the album Oxeneers while Steve wanted to name it The Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home, so we compromised and gave the album two names. 

These Arms Are Snakes - Big News