AP Track Review:
Earthbound by San Diego's punk outfit Oxen is a super charged punk rocker with hyper realistic pop flavors. With ultra dense guitar sounds and upfront female vox sometimes ghosted with a vocal tremolo (like a vocal mic run through a guitar tremolo). The thick punk guitar licks and the fact that everything is just full tilt up front is bad ass but at the same time with the double time madness, the song has a kind of super pop sort of children's Saturday morning TV show sound. Just think of hyper kids on hundreds of Pixie sticks. Loving this.
From their recently released self titled album.
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Robb Donker
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM- PRESS NOTES:
“When Jozette and I met, we bonded over our love of music and the fact that we had both struggled with debilitating anxiety and panic attacks for much of our lives,” recalls John Vineyard, one half of the husband-wife guitar/vocal duo that fronts San Diego band, The Oxen. Jozette agrees and adds, “So with that in mind, getting up in front of people and performing original songs… that mightseem a little crazy to some people.” Crazy or not, The Oxen have been blazing their own trail in theSan Diego music scene and are set to release their debut full-length album on September 6, 2019.
“John and I had been writing music in our one-bedroom apartment for years, and he finally agreed to get a band going provided we have loud guitars.” The couple started playing with other local musicians, rented out the back room of a barber shop as a rehearsal space and makeshift recordingstudio, and submitted a demo to San Diego City Beat’s “2017 Great Demo Review.” Out of 102 submissions, The Oxen’s demo was one of only five that was given the “ExtraSpecialGood” designation by the publication, and music writer Seth Combs wrote, “Three songs of excellent indie-pop that leftme clamoring for more and asking ‘where did these guys come from?’”
As it turns out, John grew up in Texas where he had some regional success with his band, El Gato, and he later toured the U.S. and played the Meltdown Festival in London as a part of the Dallas symphonic pop band, The Polyphonic Spree. Jozette has been playing the guitar and writing songs since she was a teenage punk rocker in Omaha and has performed in San Diego bands for the last 15 years. The Oxen lineup now includes bass player (and ALF enthusiast) Kevin Shumway, and drummer Greg Stone. Greg has played drums in several bands performing everything from thrash metal to children’s songs, and he claims that The Oxen’s music is the halfway point between those two extremes.
The Oxen have twice been nominated for “Best Rock Band” at the San Diego Music Awards (2017, 2018) and regularly receive airplay on the 91X local radio show, Loudspeaker, in San Diego.
Although some of the drums and bass were recorded at Rarefied Recording Studio in San Diego,The Oxen opted for a DIY approach to the majority of the recording and mixing. “Twice a week we would haul our recording gear down and set up a makeshift recording studio in the back room of a barber shop that we rented out. We’d set up microphones, crank up the guitars, and play for 4 or 5 hours, then break it all down and see what we had once we got home,” recalls John Vineyard, guitarist and vocalist for The Oxen. While recording after hours in a barber shop in San Diego’s North County may not be the most glamorous or efficient way, it was cheap, and it gave the band the time and freedom to experiment and find the sounds they were looking for. The result is a high-energy album that features alternating male/female vocals and fuzzed out guitars from the husband and wife duo, Jozette Carrico Vineyard and John Vineyard, who front the band.
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