THE
EX
Sticky
Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Wed 23rd April
When
a longstanding band still prove themselves able to cut it, the
standard thing to say is its like watching something brand new. But
with Dutch post-punkers the Ex, that doesn't quite cover it. They
sound more like a band two or three years in, who while still on that
first burst of enthusiasm have also had time to sharpen up. When
you're glad you caught them at that highpoint, cresting a wave that
must inevitably crash. And they've sounded like that every time I've
seen or heard them, in their thirty-five year career.
Before
they come on, a friend reminisces of seeing them in their shouty
punky days when he was still an angry young man. “Then a few years
later”, he continued cheerily, “I was watching them improvising
with an avant-garde cellist.” It’d be tempting to describe their
sound as “ex-punk” out of sheer cuteness. With an name that
suggests perpetually breaking company, rather than some stifling
marriage they became a jumping-off point for endless sonic
adventures. Along their path they've morphed into a twenty-piece
modernist orchestra, hung out with traditional Ethiopian musicians...
it would be harder by this point to name some turn they haven't
taken. Last time they played Brighton was with a brass section more
accustomed to jazz venues.
But
tonight guests get the night off, and the Ex are just the Ex. Part of
me wishes they'd come up with a set based on a whole new scale system
they'd devised, were collaborating with robots or running through a
concept album about Ludo. But they've reached a point where going
back to the classic four-piece seems almost like a bold new adventure
in itself, and it displays what a powerful unit they are.
In
their recent 'Wire' interview (issue 362, April
'14) Daniel Spicer was rightly praising Katherine Bornefeld's
drumming, “instinctively avoiding the usual foursquare rock
rhythms” for “tumbling polyrhythms.” And certainly her drumming
makes for a band based on quite different foundations to the rockaday
world. Notably there's points where the guitars reduce to punching
our the sparsest morse code riffs, while her pummelling drums expands
to fill the space. While for their part the three guitars tangle
together like barbed wire, then suddenly lock in and break forward
like an armoured car. (The band go in for baritone guitars, which can
when required approximate bass notes.)
I
commented a while ago that the significant thing about Led Zeppelin was the way they could sound tight and loose at the same time. Similarly, the Ex can
simultaneously sound ordered and disordered, manifesting whatRichard Elliott called “tightly controlled uncontrol”.
For
a band who often had similarities to Gang of Four, the arrival of new
singer/guitarist Arnold de Boer might have pushed their sound even
closer. Many songs are based in the same sense of insistent
confusion. Rather than righteous shouty slogans comes the perspective
of the bewildered outsider, the unchosen candidate, the gambler
always losing to the house, the rabbit in the headlights. The All Music review of their last-but-one release describes
their tracks as “anti-anthems”, sparking off the dissonance
between their propulsive force and their gnomic obliqueness.
Much
like the music, his lyrics can at the outset appear simple and direct
yet become less and less pindownable the longer they continue. Often
he'll repeat nonsense phrases with mounting intensity. He delights in
telling us one number will be sung in Friesian.
Having said it before won't stop me saying it again. If anything
ever deserved to be described as a lucid frenzy it was the Ex. Thirty
five years – and counting...
This
clip has the vocals somewhat low in the mix for some reason (which
wasn't the case on the night), but is otherwise a pretty reasonable
representation of what went on. The last track is new to me. Anyone
reading this know it?
STEPHEN
O'MALLEY + ALUK TODOLO
The
Green Door Store, Brighton, Sun 13th April
As the record shows, I exulted over having got to see Stephen
O'Malley's mother outfit - drone metal cultists Sunn0))). (Who,
looking back, I also saw on a Sunday. That's the day for it.) With my
characteristic lack of originality, I compared their sound to
entering a darkened room. At first all seems indistinguishable, but
the longer you linger the more things take shape. Pretty soon, it's
like you always lived there.
Ecept
this time, as O'Malley's guitar was accompanied only by its own
reverb and echo, I couldn't help feel we all hung around with our
eyes open and the room turned out to be empty. Perhaps that
comparison's a little harsh. The point of the piece was clearly
intended as something closer to Cage's minimalism. If you play loud
guitar long enough, all sorts of unexpected resonances start to creep
in. And the interference, the distortions, break-ups and fringe
harmonics, becomes what you listen to. The instrument is
instrumental, the guitar just the net to catch the butterflies.
(Notably O'Malley had no CDs on sale. It's a sound to hear live.)
But,
in all honesty, that's something I've heard done much better
elsewhere. Overall, it felt like those solo albums band members
brought out in the musoish Seventies – released irrespective of the
obvious fact that only when the band members together did the
elements react.
The
night was saved however, by the mesmerising set provided by Aluk
Todolo. I'm not sure whether they were intended as first support band
or co-headliner. But, having never heard of them before, I would
doubtless have missed them otherwise. Their mission statement's been described by Pitchfork as “to set the dark sounds of black metal to
the typically kaleidoscopic expanses of krautrock.” I'm not sure
whether that's a presumed or informed summary, but it's a pretty damn
good one. Plus, as befits one of life's less
obvious French exports, it led to one site giving them the somewhat
unusual combination of tags - “rock, black metal, experimental
rock, krautrock, occult rock, Paris.”
This
krautrock/metal accord was chiefly exepmplified by the bass lines,
varying between the propulsiveness of Sabbath and the looping
patterns of Can. In fact, perhaps partly from seeing him in this very venue, I was more than once moved to compare them to Damo Suzuki. There's the same win/win
mix of metronomy and perpetual change, the overwhelming force of
repetition combined with snake-like shifts in the sound – like you
can't really tell where they're bringing them in. Unlike Damo, the
tracks come in too quickly to be made up on the spot, but they have
such a keen interplay it's also hard to imagine they're all scripted
in advance.
With
so tight a rhythm section, the guitar is used more as a sound-source
generator than producer of chords or melodies – more Gang of Four's
'Anthrax' than anything Anthrax ever did.
A
short clip of Stephen O'Malley which, to quote the poster, “basically
sums up the entire 40 minutes”...
...and
a longish clip from Aluk Todolo, not from Brighton or even this tour.
Just a great clip...
MIKE
WATT AND THE MISSINGMEN
Green
Door Store, Brighton, Wed 9th April
The
Missingmen... I had taken that band name to be punningly seizing the
bull by the horns. For Mike Watt's chiefly known as the bassist from
the influential punk band the Minutemen, whose (to quote a reliable source of gossip) “anti-rockist eclecticism”
was sadly and abruptly curtailed back in 1985, by the death of his
chief collaborator D Boon. Actually, as I was later to discover through an equally reliable source of gossip, its not to do with
Boon's enforced absence but a joke on a later band – the Secondmen.
It still kind of works.
With
a guy like Watt, you'd probably expect him not to provide a greatest
hits set of bygone days, or serve up a fan-favoured album in the
correct track order. However, you might not necessarily expect him to
instead embark on a forty-five minute “punk opera” about the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
So
of course he does. Describing it, with some glee, as “a fucked up
thing”.
“Punk
opera” might be something of a provocative gag of a title for this
piece, 'Hyphenated-Man.' Think of a more DIY, less
cartoony version of some of the old Zappa side-stretchers, such as
'Greggery Peccary'. Though he also calls it a
“song” its neither long song nor song cycle. Its composed of
individual pieces, each too short and sharp to work as songs in their
own right. They need to be fitted into the a greater whole, like the
individual stones making up a a mosaic. (Watt himself calls them
“parts”.)
Like
many of their compatriots on the SST label the Minutemen eschewed
hardcore's confines to compress off-kilter funk, Beefhartian jazz and
wired post-punk into almost impossibly short, tight numbers - likened
by Simon Reynolds to “electro-convulsive jolts”. And the
hyphenated music of tonight's the punked-up, angular, agitated,
caffeinated funk you might expect to stem from that source. (If
adding more of a country influence from time to time.) It was
simultaneously akin to and unlike Nomeansno's long, lumbering,
bass-powered numbers.
If
not a long set, it was so skittering and frenetic it was constantly
springing something new on you, never allowing you to slip into a
reverie. Watt's habit of trading vocals with guitarist Tom Watson,
sometimes a single word at a time, seemed symptomatic. It was quite
possibly a very different gig for those who knew the piece beforehand
and those who didn't. For those of us who hadn't, listening to it's
clutch of tangents almost like trying to hit a moving target.
Alertness was mandatory. There was quite possibly more going on
within one ten-minute segment than most punk bands have in their
whole careers. Leaving you at the end feeling some combination of
“wow!”, “whew!” and “sorry, could you say that again?”
Its
challenges and rewards were quite possibly eased by Watt's engaging
personality. These days he looks like he should be staffing what
Americans call a 'Mom and Pop Store', while sounding like some cool
old jazz guy. And he seems as comfortable carrying a bass as anyone
I've ever seen. I'm not even sure he unstraps it to go to bed at
night. Plus, to pursue the Zappa comparison, the piece is full of
infectious humour, often causing the audience to laugh out loud.
And
the Bosch element? Not only is the piece hyphenated in its title but
in each segment, example including 'Arrow-Pierced-Egg-Man',
'Hand-and-Feet-Only Man' and the somewhat splendidly named
'Confused-Parts-Man'. I can only suppose that each
segment is dedicated one of Bosch's hybrid creatures, the parts
crowding together to make up a scene as the amassed figures in his
paintings.
The
opening six hyphenated minutes, though not from Brighton...
The last The Ex song: "Every sixth is cracked":
ReplyDeletehttp://www.discogs.com/Ex-Brass-Unbound-Enormous-Door/master/564336
Thanks! At the gig I picked up the release before that, 'Catch My Shoe', and have pretty much been playing it continually ever since. Perhaps I should have got both at the same time.
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