The Hunt for Red Fox and the Standard Ox
Image source: Red Fox and the Standard Ox on MySpace
I donât remember exactly how I first came across this little duo. What I do know was it was 2006, I was 14, on MySpace, and had developed a preternatural talent for digging up the most obscure and unpopular music I could find through means that are a mystery to me now. Hipster was a term that had yet to see the use it sees today, but I was already gunning for that designation.
Red Fox and the Standard Ox had the most incredible profile layout my tender young eyes had ever seen. It was a full-page collage of ancient, and a little spooky, family photos knitted seamlessly together into a 1024x768 sepia dream. Google doesnât have an older cached version of the page, the Wayback Machine has nothing at all, so youâll have to take my word for it. The embedded music player started automatically, and the music possessed this same dreamy, far-away and bittersweet quality. I was too young to really understand the term nostalgia, but thatâs what the whole experience captured. Perfectly.
The whole thing was all very capital A Artâą and did a pretty solid job of overwhelming and enrapturing me. So of course, I immediately went to whatever MySpace music download website was working that week and ripped the tracks and threw them in all their 96kbps glory onto my mighty iPod Video.
 âBoth men in this picture were decorated soldiers in different warsâ
There were only three tracks up on the site. After a couple of weeks I was hungry for more, and decided to do a little digging. They had absolutely no presence of any kind anywhere else on the web, appeared never to respond to comments on their page, and I was one of like three listeners on last.fm. Google offered no results of any kind outside of the page I already had. There were no member names listed. Clicking through to the photo section of the page you were greeted with a different collection of old photos (stitched together at the top of the page here), some in colour this time, and some with strange little captions like: both men in this picture were decorated soldiers in different wars (a family picture containing only one man, his wife, and numerous children); as well as _raising the colors _(an image of a group of middle-age people in the late-70s or early-80s hoisting the Union Jack over a decidedly un-British countryside).
 â_raising the colors_â
And so I added them to my top 8, and that was that for the next ten years. I grew increasingly attached to the three songs (even throughout my nosedive into pretentious bitrate-obsessed audiophile snobbery), managed to re-grab them in 128kbps at some point, and while the enigmatic nature of the group responsible occupied my mind from time-to-time I did nothing more to seek them out. Until the other night.
For some reason, as I sat in my low-rent motel room somewhere in Canada the pent-up curiosity of the many years suddenly became overwhelming. Google lead me to the Wikipedia page for a band called Eye Alaska that had released one EP and one full-length album back at the of the â00s. There was no detailed explanation of their relationship to Red Fox and the Standard Ox, other than the latterâs inclusion in the sidebar list of related artists. The article did mention, however, a band Dead Letter Diaries that two of the members has previously been a part of back in 2005. It seemed like a dead-end lead, as the group were described as post-grunge. It seemed unlikely to me that in the space of a year or less that two people could depart so dramatically from one sound to another. Frank Turner and Chuck Ragan were proof in my mind that this typically takes a number of years to come to.
Nevertheless, I hunted down Dead Letter Diaries to see whether the vocals at least bore any resemblance to the band I was seeking. They did not. The group sounded like every fucking terrible, sort-of-heavy band you hear at battle of the bands and school music program performances the world over. The vocals were somehow the worst part of the whole mediocre assault on my ears; I thought that this couldnât possibly be them.
Dead Letter Diaries profile image on PureVolume.
Disheartened, but not entirely without hope of making progress, I returned after utterly fruitless searching to the only solid lead Iâd found in Eye Alaskaâs Wikipedia page. I figured, if the early days sounded completely unlike what I needed to find to constitute proof, maybe looking later along in the band memberâs chronology would turn up something a little more promising. The vocalist of the two that had been apart of Dead Letter Diaries had apparently reinvented himself rather recently, going from Brandon Wronski to the far more marketable Roy English. According to the article he had quit Eye Alaska and was on his way to work at a fucking Pizza Hut in fucking Idaho for some reason. The story goes that one the road, he somehow ran into a producer who helped with his songwriting and production and before you bloody know it heâs popped a single, then an EP and now a full-length album is about to drop.
Iâd like to point out at this point my own stupidity in jumping from end-to-end of the Roy Englishâs chronology here, rather than listening to the band that had been definitively linked to Red Fox and the Standard Ox to start with. But, pushing on.
Reinvented. From the Roy English Facebook page.
Roy English was only a little more promising than the first artist. At least, here, he sounded like he could sing. The delivery was entirely different and sounded nothing at all alike, but it was at least a point of similarity between the two. However tenuous a link it mayâve been it was at least a link. Roy Englishâs tracks that I found available for streaming were all very polished modern pop, with obviously but not obnoxiously autotuned vocals, and not a trace of the intricate guitar work I was chasing.
I found a link to a so-billed âstripped downâ and âacousticâ rendition of Englishâs single Canât Lie which briefly buoyed me up to finally finding a solid lead. But it sounded virtually identical to the studio version of the track, albeit with some of the synth work being offset to some dude on a baby grand. But English himself was still crooning and banging on a trigger pad throughout.
It was at this point I had the fucking genius realisation that I should probably just listen to Eye Alaska like I shouldâve done to start with. I grabbed a copy of both their â08 EP Yellow & Elephant and their â09 album Genesis Underground and immediately put them on. And all at once it came together, the vocal style was almost identical, more polished as youâd expect from something actually has a budget, but this was definitely the same guys thatâd recorded three songs and uploaded them under a weird pseudonym with weird nostalgic photos and custom MySpace layout back in â06. I didnât like it as much, but shit, it was pretty good.
Eye Alaska supporting VersaEmerge at a show in Cambridge, Mass. 2008. Photo by Mdigirol, uploaded to WikiMedia
So after what had become a good few hours of effort and fucking around on the internet when I shouldâve been doing something productive had amount to this: these three songs that I dug on for most of my teenage years and my entire adult life up until this point were composed and recorded by two dudes, one of which has dropped off the face of the planet entirely, and one thatâs become an increasingly bland wannabe popstar. Somewhere in the middle of this, they had a band that had a couple of pretty decent releases.
It seemed like a pretty meagre reward for the amount of time Iâd spent wondering and the amount of time Iâd just expended chasing down skinny internet leads. And I guess it was. But shitty dissatisfying answers are better than no answers at all, I guess.
So finally Iâve embedded the three tracks that kicked off this whole nearly-decade long saga below. If youâre a closet mid-00s pop punk/3rd wave emo fan youâll probably dig it. If not, maybe you will anyway?
redfoxandthestandardox from Clancy Noakes on Myspace.
And if anyone actually happens to read this exercise in maximum self-indulgence and has any other tracks from them when they were Red Fox and the Standard Ox, for the love of fucking God hook me up.
