!earshot Top 200 of 2021

Getting Ready for the Second Coming of Ox

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And while Browning looks like he might have a career as a music media critic ahead of him, it seems he’s actually been fairly busy with that whole ‘band’ thing as well.
Mark Browning and Ox are working
on their sophomore release.Besides completing a tour of Britain in the spring, Ox was also recently nominated for a Western Canadian Music Award for best roots act. Browning recently opened for the Be Good Tanyas at a Hurricane Katrina benefit show at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver as well, collaborating onstage with folk/acoustic pioneer Jesse Zubot. Plus, on top of it all, he has been working feverishly on Ox’s sophomore release, which has yet to be named.
“We’ve got a lot of songs ready. A lot. We’re just mixing everything right now. So we’re pushing to make it a double-cd. A bunch of the songs from the Upstairs Sound Lab EP will be on it as well.
I ask about the EP in question, which was written, recorded, mixed and seemingly ready for release over a year ago.
“I love that recording. To me it’s Frank Zappa meets Velvet Underground; it’s two steps in the right direction for us. But when it went to the label, they hated it. They hated it so much that they went cold on Dust Bowl Revival too and refused to release that either. But then at a show in England, the sound guy bought a copy of it and played it on the PA at the end of the night, and I remember thinking to myself ‘fuck, this sounds so good! We should have released I realized at that time that I shouldn't have listened to the label, and in the last two years, I had let the industry people that I was involved with dictate where I went, and I realized that was a big mistake. this, what were we thinking?’ And I realized at that time that I shouldn’t have listened to the label, and in the last two years, I had let the industry people that I was involved with dictate where I went, and I realized that was a big mistake. That EP should have been released a year ago, and it would have been a hard second album to deal with. No one would have understood it. Everyone would be like ‘there’s only like four songs, but there’s nine tracks. What the fuck? I don’t get it!’ And that’s exactly what you want, you don’t want people to get it. Then it’s too easy. You’re not making Corn-Flakes, you’re making All-Bran. It’s chess, not checkers.” Again, he laughs.
So what’s in store for the new record then?
“Basically we’re going to fill out the EP. We’ll have the good songs on there from the EP, like “Sugarcane,” “Surrender,” “El Camino” (both of them, number one and number two), and then a handful of new songs, and also one or two that we’ve been playing for a long time that we never recorded. I’m not really thinking about the album that we’ll release after that, which will basically come out hopefully like days after the first one. Because by the time the label releases the first one, we’ll already have the second one written and recorded and ready to go. That’s the plan anyway.”
In the meantime, unless fans want to fly down to Arizona, it looks like they’ll have to wait to see Ox live again any time soon. But if you’re hurting for the Ox action, Mark Browning has these words for you:
“Just say to yourself, five times fast, ‘girls like Ox.’ Then you’ll get it.”

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