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