Thursday, November 17, 2005

DOUBLE LEOPARDS

In case you were ever thinking of using All Music as a source for anything but laughter, be advised that their entry for Double Leopards consists of one review (of the new Troubleman CD) by someone named Greg Prato, whose credentials apparently consist of having heard of Metal Machine Music. Nothing in "All Music" about any of the band's previous slabs of massive drone, which, though pathetic, is fortunate, since they would've probably gotten such incisive comments as "I could do that" or "this isn't music" or "man, this all sounds the same after one listen, I give up." How bad a "writer" do you have to be to have not gotten past the insanely tired "experimental music is just someone pressing record in a wind tunnel" argument? Stay tuned for Greg's stirring review of Jackson Pollock (preview: "someone spilled paint on the floor...")

UPDATE: The allmusic.com review referred to above has apparently been wisely taken down, thanks to Many Spaceships for the tip...

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

EXCEPTER

Saw Excepter at Cake Shop on Saturday night, after a long day of gawking at records and those who sell them. Though I know people whose mileage has varied, I think Excepter are a fine performing act and their early-bird set on Sat. was proof. This time they were inexplicably a quartet (Caitlin Cook was there watching, and I don't think Calder Martin was there at all, though I'm still not totally straight on the who's who), and even began with a real-live drum kit, but eventually it was classic Excepter: warped pre-set beats, tremblingly distorted synth lines, and lethargic/hypnotic/trance-o-tonic vocal moans. The less murky, less layered sound of Self-Destruction continued here, as amount and volume of the sounds were more spare compared to their previous records and the previous multi-voiced, floor-crawling electro-orgy I saw in D.C. last year, but I dig the new sound just as much. There's something so geniusly simple about taking weirdly generic computer beats, tweaking them a bit here and there, and layerying woozy keyboards and zombified singing over the top - the knee-jerk way to think of Excepter(because Jeff Ryan was previously in No-Neck Blues Band) is as a digitized version of NNCK, but really, that's not that far off, and nothing but a compliment...

mp3:
EXCEPTER - "Interplay: Your House" from Self Destruction
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