SUCH are the dynamic knots and unforeseeable juxtapositions throughout Thin Black Duke that there are moments where you utterly forget the fact that innovation in rock ceased to be a thing around 20 years ago, after which juncture most guitar-led music booked a one-way ticket for a destination signposted Maximum Irrelevance.

What do you need to know about Oxbow? They’re from San Francisco. They’ve made seven albums in three decades. They’re fronted by an amateur boxer cum writer and editor called Eugene S Robinson who doesn’t sing so much as grunt. And they have made an album that wraps a symphonic blanket around a subspecies of math-rock that is clever without being smug, elemental in its bludgeoning power and compelling in its capacity to do the precise opposite of what your lugs were expecting.

Robinson apparently wrote the lyrics for Thin Black Duke before hearing guitarist/composer Niko Wenner’s musical ideas and while that might sound like a recipe for chaos, bedlam never sounded better. Across eight songs brimming with ideas and intelligence, from the deranged opener Cold and Well-lit Place to the jolie laide finale of The Finished Line, Thin Black Duke is a revelation, an extraordinary work in an era of crushing mediocrity.