Excepter
Throne
/load; 2005/

 

 

 

 

 www.loadrecords.com

I was still absorbing Excepter’s first release, the astounding KA when I received Throne.  I had picked up the band’s debut a couple of weeks prior in a local record shop and its dizzying, swirling mass of psychedelic melodies tripped me up big time.  They weren’t as melodic as Gang Gang Dance nor as oppressively cold, distant and bleak as groups like the Double Leopards.  Excepter has remained in the middle between each of those extremes.  Individually, each of the sounds in their songs serves a purpose, either frighteningly or melodically so, but as a whole they combine into a disorienting mess.  It’s always been hard to pinpoint just what it is that they are doing so well, and personally I’d like to leave it at that and just soak in these sounds.

“Jrone (Two)” features throbbing drones with lacerating industrial beats sprinkled over top.  What sound like piston thrusts (but what is actually crateful percussion) follows a steady one, two, three beat until closer towards the end, where everything becomes distorted and morphed into a mutation of its prior self.  The hits become muted and the drones more wobbly.  “The Heart Beat” begins with Excepter’s trademark weird distorted vocals and some more crateful percussion.  More electronics kick in some minor spacey drones until the song becomes overrun with light cymbal tapping.  The finale featured some gross, garbled sounding electronics with more of the cascading space sounds.  Closer “(The Ass)” sounds just like a mutant space creature baffling and baffooning all over the place.  It actually sounds like some creep creature until things devolve into ambience (by Excepter’s standards) and some bird chirping.  By the end of Throne I was not as overwhelmed as I was upon first hearing KA but that’s OK.  I don’t hear anyone else making as interesting a racket as this.  Do you?

- Andrew Iliadis

/december 2005/