BSPH: Oxbow & Marianne Faithfull - Insylum

 "Insylum" is a song collaboration of the American noise rock psycho punk blues band Oxbow and singer-songwriter Marianne Faithful. The song is an interpretation of the classic Willie Dixon song "Insane Asylum". However, it is reworked to the point of being a thing of its own.

"Insylum" was released in 1997 on Oxbow's album "Serenade in Red". The song is punishingly abrasive hard-edged interpretation of the classic blues song spliced with the hard rock reiteration of the blues by the likes of Led Zeppelin.

This song is a great example of a creative use of cliches and subverting them into something else with its own substance. "Insylum" is a Frankenstein monster of the song that seems like a casualty of a transporter accident in "Star Trek". "Insylum" is deformed and barely hangs together. At the same time, the song contains this weird imposing aura. Every second of "Insylum" means it. This song is not a pleasant listen, this song erupts the void upon the listener and makes him gaze into it looking for something nonplush nondescript.

The song stomps its way through with that particularly nasty bone crunching 1-2 step that grows with intensity throughout the verse until it breaks down into a hysteric chorus.

The lyrics of "Insylum" are about longing and yearning in its most brutal and devastating form. In its core, "Insylum" tells a typical story of the relationship falling apart and subsequent attempts to fix it. The catch is that the lover is locked up in the asylum and probably for a reason. Because of that the song slowly morphs from trying to get things back to accepting the reality of the situation.

The song is all about sonically depicting the throes of the protagonist who just can't take it anymore but slowly getting over it. This notion is delivered by an assorted collection of seething sobbing, crying, torturous howling, wailing, bailing, grunts, random sideline snorts, and opaque babble.

The song starts in medias res and then immediately takes a u-turn in an opposite direction. It kinda walks backwards all the time and it creates a sense of suspense - you almost expect this song to stumble and fall apart.

The rest of the dreadful atmosphere is accomplished with a mindful use of blues cliches wrapped into an additional layer of coarse fuzz and tingle. It is a dark-dark song.

The guitar parts are slightly malformed and tremblesome. They play some classic blues lick with an additional deep to the feel, but ut is not as much playing as it is erupting upon the song with its melting lava burning the ground in its way. Then there is a little organ that almost mocks what is going on in the song with its tingling hiss.

The MVP of the song are the drums by Greg Davis. His drum parts are less about constructing a rhythmic backbone of the song as they are all about the suspence, ebbs and flows of tension. The majority of the drum arrangement is a simple 1-2 16th beat that acts that plays waiting game staring contest with the listener until it breaks into a brutal beatdown.

The use of bass in this song is also very unconventional. Dan Adams' bass follows the drums and adds some shiny blacks to the beat. At the same time the bass line is delineating space in which the action is going. It is something like echolocation - flickering contours that may or may not resemble something familiar. If there is a way to depict the monsters produced by the sleep of reason - this is a good example of making it right. The bass line itself reeks of dread. 

The other strange thing about the song is an anticlimactic closure it delivers in the end. Over the course of the song the arrangement slowly devolves into a carnival mockery - it gets ridiculous with its intensity and then it stops as if it was all play. It leaves an unsettling feeling afterwards.

"Insylum" is a master-class in layered subversion of cliches and forging something new out of the old parts. The way it preparates the blues conventions, reinvents its most generic elements and adds the new flourishes to the age old narratives is spectacular.