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Excepter, "Debt Dept"
Excepter's fourth album seems like an obnoxious mess at first, but repeated listens reveal patterns in the chaos. Using deceptively simplistic beats, electronics, swimming voices, and even a bass clarinet for good measure, they add rich textures to uneasy rhythms for music that is ridiculously addictive.
On most of these songs, the deceptively simple rhythms become the core on which the other elements depend. Voices are thrown into the mix seemingly at random while counter rhythms, found sounds, and melodic bits from other instruments come and go. It is this constant motion that propels the album forward, albeit at such a similar pace for much of it that some of the distinction between tracks is blurred. The rich stimulation overload quickly becomes the norm, making anything simpler boring by comparison.
Many of the lyrics are about economic politics but are more sarcastic than didactic. A good example is the opening line of "Shots Ring": "Did you know the cost of life is $1/That's why there are slaves." In a similar vein is "Kill People," in which a variety of voices shout the title in different styles and are processed in a number of ways. Instead of becoming an annoyance, the lyrics serve the purpose of keeping the songs playful rather than succumbing to overseriousness.
There's a sense of humor at work here, but the album has its share of uneasy moments as well. "Greenhouse/Stretch" has a strange electronic opening vastly different from the songs the precede it and eventually delves into some dark areas in its second half. On its heels, "Walking Through the Night" has sinister distorted sounds on top of heavy beats. One definite head-scratcher is "Sunrise." While it is a decent song, it initially takes its cues so obviously from Sonic Youth that I assumed it was a cover or at least an interpretation of sorts, but no credit to that effect appears anywhere on the booklet. Even more puzzling is the last-minute addition of a line from Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground." I'm not quite sure what the band's getting at on this track, but it's fun to listen to anyway.
Excepter take the kitchen sink approach to composition with this album, and it succeeds despite the initial vertigo of having to make sense of it all. Yet the group throws out a lifeline with its beats, allowing the rest of the music to unfold one glorious step at a time.
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