Oxbow is a band from San Francisco, CA. Their biography is a beautiful story of belligerence and random violence, like Chuck Palahniuk re-writing Dickens’ Hard Times. Live, on a good night, they remind you that not all art is artifice. But are they really worthy of the ultimate immortalization in rock: the tour documentary?

I’ll save you the suspense: the answer is yes, yes, and hell yeah. But let’s pretend we’re getting all rhetorical on yo’ ass for a moment. In the spring of 2002, indie filmmaker Christian Anthony set out to document Oxbow’s European tour. Christ knows why. Maybe someone dared him? Maybe he lost a bet to Big Paulie, the Pimp of Polk St? Whatever, this hapless film maker became privy to the deepest, darkest secrets of Oxbowland; and, I’m happy to add, managed to make a kick-ass documentary to boot. Yet, due to ongoing psychological trauma of the most expensive kind, I find it difficult to talk about Music for Adults in any concrete fashion. Here, for you, are my "fragments of a review." Use them wisely:

It all begins with four minutes of viscera-shredding rock, just to make sure no one’s tempted to fast forward. Then a talking head: Mr. Random European, post-Oxbow, "Where does it stop – does it stop?"

No.

(Oxbow singer) Eugene Robinson off stage is not Eugene Robinson on stage. But even off stage, Mr. Robinson is a bit of an enigma; then again, so is the rest of the band. Take Niko Wenner, guitarist extraordinaire: off stage, he’s the kid that always got beat up in school; on stage, guitar strapped on, you know he’ll take the Keith Richards’ mentality to the max and "chop the mother down" who dared to invade his space. But then again, he’s got Eugene to take care of that.

Manuel Libeskind from Splatter promotions has been dealing with Oxbow tours since 1995 and, quite frankly, should have been dead a long time ago. That he can still smile says a lot for the power of the Swiss mentality and the awesome effects of taking E and LSD at the same time.

Just as the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" was conceived as a project that would be both a novel and a film, once you’ve read Oxbow’s tour diaries of the 2002 tour, you’ll be frantically fast-forwarding and rewinding the Oxbow DVD, trying to see if any evidence of Eugene’s multiple assaults has been captured on stage. It has. It’s all funny.

To fully understand the enigma that is Eugene Robinson: even as he’s proudly displaying a pool ball in a sock, proof of his pugilistic present, he’s cradling a PDA/cell phone in his other hand.

Let’s get one thing straight: Robinson is not a confrontational man. It’s us. As the great unwashed, we’re naturally suspicious of a band who seem to mean it, man! as much as Oxbow do. This feeling is dispelled upon witnessing a recalcitrant gig-goer going to the land of Nod via Robinson’s arm on his wind-pipe.

For those of us from the UK, there is a frisson of the insane to see this band playing in the hinterlands of Northern Britain. The band invite a drunken bagpipe player onstage – where the hell did he come from? And why are they appearing before what looks like an ambient techno accordion player?

Dan Adams, Bass Masta, upon driving away from yet another gig: ‘We have all the equipment, right? Maybe?"

There are some particularly excellently filmed gig scenes, and the only frustration from Anthony’s film is that it is often difficult to make out what people are saying, due to the way that the sound was recorded. Sometimes, however, you’re glad you can’t understand exactly what someone is saying. Particularly when it’s Eugene.

It’s always difficult to actually describe Oxbow to people who haven’t experienced them "in the flesh," as it were. "Outsider art" originally referred to people working on the fringes of art. "Art Bas," or raw art, is perhaps a more adapt percept.

Is that venue where Oxbow end up playing in Switzerland (maybe) really The Black Lodge from "Twin Peaks"? If not, can you give that dancing dwarf his curtains back, please?

"We played and we played and we played – and then we stopped playing. And that was Berlin." Niko Wenner.

Go buy it. (8.5/10)