The trouble with New York band Excepter is that, to paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Zaphod Beeblebrox, they’re so hip they have trouble seeing over their pelvises. They’re the kind of band who blind you with a kind of idiot savant audacity that leaves you unsure whether what you’ve just heard is frighteningly raw genius or the most boring thing ever recorded – the aural equivalent of the endless adolescent daubs that cover the US art scene like bad acne.
Alternation is the latest incarnation of a band who have undergone a number of freestyle musical guises since forming in 2002, from doom-laden drone noise, and dervish-like performances to this, a collection of electro-dub meanderings which on initial listening seems to have about as much energy as a snail dosed-up on horse tranquilizers. Yet this is perhaps just the point, and may well be the most interesting thing about it. Sat alongside some of their better-known contemporaries on the New York avant-electronic-noise-art-whatever scene – Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance – Excepter’s approach to making what, on this hour-long excursion, amounts to their ‘dance’ record, is willfully unpolished, and at times rather funny for it (check out YouTube.com for their sinisterly dumb clip Alternation EPK), at times evoking some of the anti-electronica electronics found on The Red Krayola’s Fingerpainting (1999). Drum beats are simple and straight, plodding along at an amiably lazy lope, caked in layers of dubby reverb. Bass lines fall into loose step alongside them; sub-bass frequencies providing a little subtle variety to the one or two note loops. Over the top drone woozy analogue synths, not unlike the groaning, wheezing moans of Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson’s homemade electronics on Throbbing Gristle’s early albums. Also not dissimilar to TG, are the affectedly slack vocals of John Fell Walker (ex-No Neck Blues Band), who employs a similar anti-vocal approach as Genesis P. Orridge, yet here with none of the menace and all of the boredom; ‘I’d like to shake everyone’s hand’, he intones on ‘The Rock Stepper’, ‘but I’m up here on stage.’
The album been described as ‘dawn-of-dance-music’ music, and where it really hits its stride, is where it manages to evoke the primitivism of early Acid House; a simplicity and freeform attitude that at best shows up over-complex laptop electronica for its po-facedness. Possessed of a nasty, drowsy psychedelic quality, Alternation mostly sounds meandering and lost, yet this is possibly its greatest quality.
