Like a David Lynch film, Oxbow takes the listener through a potent show of skillfully rendered beauty, grisly hellishness and shameless flexing of the avant-garde imagination from both sides. While it's all the rage to be as heavy as lead and chugga-chugging like rusty machinery, The Narcotic Story retains all the grisliness any modern hardcore or metal act could possibly offer—maybe more actually—but at the same time it's sparse and almost tuneful.