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Thursday, December 5, 2024 
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+ Donato Wharton - Body Isolations
+ Svalastog - Woodwork
+ Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet
+ Rosy Parlane - Jessamine
+ Jarvis Cocker - The Jarvis Cocker Record
+ Múm - Peel Session
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+ Wolf Eyes - Human Animal
+ Christina Carter - Electrice
+ The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
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+ Various Artists - Musics In The Margin
+ Rafael Toral - Space
+ Bob Dylan - Modern Times
+ Excepter - Alternation
+ Chris Thile - How To Grow A Woman From The Ground
+ Brad Mehldau - Live in Japan
+ M Ward - Post-War
+ Various Artists - Touch 25
+ The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely
+ The White Birch - Come Up For Air
+ Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country
+ Coachwhips - Double Death
+ Various Artists - Tibetan And Bhutanese Instrumental And Folk Music, Volume 2
+ Giuseppe Ielasi - Giuseppe Ielasi
+ Cex - Actual Fucking
+ Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
+ Leafcutter John - The Forest And The Sea
+ Carla Bozulich - Evangelista
+ Barbara Morgenstern - The Grass Is Always Greener
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+ Asobi Seksu - Citrus
+ Marsen Jules - Les Fleurs
+ The Moore Brothers - Murdered By The Moore Brothers
+ Regina Spektor - Begin To Hope
+ The 1900s - Plume Delivery EP
+ Alejandro Escovedo - The Boxing Mirror
+ Function - The Secret Miracle Fountain
+ Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
+ Loscil - Plume
+ Boris - Pink
+ Deadboy And The Elephantmen - We Are Night Sky
+ Glissandro 70 - Glissandro 70
+ Calexico - Garden Ruin (Review #2)
+ Calexico - Garden Ruin (Review #1)
+ The Flaming Lips - At War With The Mystics
+ The Glass Family - Sleep Inside This Wheel
+ Various Artists - Songs For Sixty Five Roses
+ The Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea
+ Motorpsycho - Black Hole/Blank Canvas
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+ Sondre Lerche And The Faces Down Quartet - Duper Sessions
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Excepter
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Alternation
5 Rue Christine
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Excepter's music is hard to classify. Certainly, it isn't noise, although it values oft-atonal motion over any sort of structure or melody. It isn't jazz, even if it is molded out of group improvisations based on a mood, thought or theme. It isn't pop or rock, but it seems to play by aesthetic rules closely associated with both. Excepter approximate all these things, with anything too "genre" having been washed away, as if identifying characteristics were nothing but stains upon the group's true nature.

Alternation, their new one, is a hall of mirrors, more like Excepter's first, Vacation/KA (2004), than the trio of mood improvisations most recently released. It is Excepter's lumbering body, lurching through the hall, shifting shapes suddenly, stumbling towards what turns out to be a brighter, more sexual, more-or-less simple nature. The sound (at first blush) seems more straightforward. Then more complex.

It's always been like this.

Over the past couple of years, Excepter released a series of recordings seemingly touched by some sort of external logic. At best, it is confusing, almost inscrutable; at worst, total bullshit. A logic that can never be taken apart and qualified for mass consumption, it can (and should) only be understood on an individual level. Self Destruction, Throne (both 2005) and Sunbomber (2006) were mad, bubbling, dirge-dervish things, overflowing with musical invention, whisper-drawn instruction, old-fashioned luck and a strange beauty. To listen to Excepter is to be plunged into a collective mind — which, with its mob mentality, is a strange place, any personal motives having been mutated by collective drive, a mystery to which only the listener can create the clues used to solve it. It's exhausting, but thrilling and personal.

Alternation begins with a sort of familiarity: a synth-bass line oscillating for a few loops, a faux-cowbell shuddering, but then, something unexpected — cohesion. What is this? "Ice Cream Van" is miraculously steady, with rhythmic and melodic elements essentially making sense, being actual rhythm and melody, not some Excepter-world approximation. The group sounds leaner, more purposeful. Was that an actual song? Did the singer just try to make some sort of chorus, at least some repetition in the vocals? Is this a good thing?

Before wandering too far into Alternation, one has to remember that this is a 60-minute album, whereas earlier releases were all half that. Anyone could tell you that 60-minute songs are boring. So, in order to make a full-length, Excepter were pretty much forced to work out a new strategy. Taken together, the opening third of Alternation works as a piece, with "Lypse6ix NM" dragging the listener back towards Excepter's more recognizable murky pit after "Ice Cream Van." "The 'Rock' Stepper" again surprises, with cohesion and melody, some static yet shifting synths, a hard beat, not-so-serious attempts at a refrain, and all sorts of interesting atmospheric goings-on. "The Ladder," a short, quiet interlude, follows.

As the album progresses, different textures, drops in sound quality, contrasting sources, bits of pop, bits of industrial (like "(The Pipes)," constructed completely from banging on the plumbing in the recording studio's basement), stabs at actual singing, elongated moans — all things Excepter, and some things not, pass by at variable levels of engagement. As "If I Were You" disintegrates into "Whirl Whirl," the listener is hard pressed to recognize it as a new track and not just a new section, but, I swear, whether it's brought on by purposeful obfuscation or just boring passages (and in the mind-warp, it's hard to tell), there are moments throughout the album that will shatter your expectations, moments of actual shock, almost like being frightened. The final track, "'Back Me Up' (Show)," updates mid-period Autechre for a more fractured world, as if the aforementioned glitch-techno stars' machines have revolted against them, angered by their masters' touch, then finally settle down to have some nice machine-sex. The moans and grunts reach almost orgasmic heights of momentous interaction.

One gets to feeling that Excepter have revealed too much on Alternation. Where earlier recordings featured elements similar to each other, they also showed Excepter coming out with dramatically different results every time. Here, it seems that they may exhaust their ideas, that they actually are shooting their load rather than revealing just one facet of a larger, mysterious, secret whole. Or maybe, five- to 10-minute samplings of Excepter's mind-play just can't subvert your definitions of time and space as well as a 30-minute treatment.

This is a fine album, but one that must be held to a new set of standards. From album to album, Excepter have changed their sound; Alternation, by contrast, is confusing in that it changes the way Excepter present their sound. One can only hope that Excepter aim to confuse.



by Jesse Steichen




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