Eugene S. Robinson has written for GQ, The Wire, Grappling Magazine, LA Weekly, Vice Magazine, Hustler, and Decibel, among many others. He has also been Editor-in-Chief of OZY, Code, and EQ. Robinson is the vocalist and frontman for Oxbow, a rock group-cum-fight club. He is also the vocalist for the critically acclaimed punk-metal supergroup Buñuel. His memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight into Murderer’s Row was published in October 2023.
Part of this has everything to do with the whole of how, technologically speaking, music can be made these days. I can’t tell you how others do it but I can tell you how BUÑUEL does it: The songs are sent from Milan to Monte Vallier’s Ruminator Audio in San Francisco. I get a call, and after listening, in the case of Mansuetude, 173 times prior to standing in front of a mic, I do what one does when standing behind a mic.
Nothing shocking here but a few noteworthy quirks. The songs are recorded in the order in which they arrive. They are recorded in one session without a single practice because scratch vocals codify failure and who needs that? Then they are returned to Milan.
Mario Quintero from Spotlights and Timo Ellis from Netherlands mix and produce and then I listen to it ONCE before mastering. I send in notes and refuse to listen to it again until it’s in my hand, a finished product.
For intents and purposes this gets me as close as humanly possible to being able to listen to it with what I like to call “the ears of the street.” Like it wasn’t me who made it. Like it wasn’t me who was in it. This highwire act lets me know, at least privately, whether or not what we’ve done sucks.
Has it ever happened that this way of doing things has bitten me in the ass? Sure — I did a record for Dead Elephant that I had wished I had been shot in the throat rather than have heard it on release. But that being as it may: Mansuetude is not that.
It’s dark, dingy, and dirty and for such a placid title, for want of a better word: mean. Perfectly fitting for the spirit of the age we now find ourselves.
Like the movie The Maltese Falcon was a documentary, Mansuetude manages to make all of our baser instincts seem noble in the absence of any counterbalancing weight. So every time I listen to it — and I now have listened to it, with the ears of the street, about 103 times (thanks to Apple Music stream counters, this I know) — I am surprised at the pop underpinnings to the shreds of noise, metal and post-punk that make it sound like theme songs to a late night/early morning round of crimes. All of which are bloody, all of which are unfortunate, and all of which are bloody unfortunate.
It’s a beautiful sound and I can’t believe it’s me on it. And Megan O. from Couch Slut, and Jacob Bannon from Converge and Duane Denison from Jesus Lizard. Oh, what beautiful music we’ve made. This and my memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water & Straight Into Murderer’s Row make 2024 the first year I could honestly say I’d die happy after.
Though, just to be clear, I have no large scale interest in EVER dying.
And to close, runners up would be Chat Pile’s Cool World, SUMAC’s The Healer, and the Jesus Lizard’s Rack.
