KA was money shots really. Dom nailed the theory-- by now Excepter very well might be calling themselves a "fractal noise band," too. But live the band is far less efficient. Sometimes they take eternities to pop, masking their moves with insider theater-punk and the vicious tease of frontwoman Caitlin Cook's jacket-only costumes. Blah, what are we waiting for exactly? With these guys I feel like I'm playing Ouija: I sense their secret language and know from experience their all-night junior high seance bit actually goes somewhere pretty fantastic. Excepter never crack though-- they're burlesque, the best sort of infuriating.
But again, we don't get that from KA-- porno-pop by comparison. Even Excepter's live recordings lie a bit, since the gig's never just a withhold/release audio event and the band leans on drama to hook the camera-phone polloi. So here's Throne, a massive piecemeal of patient, throbbing noise, more molasses than anything I've seen them do live, somewhat demanding because everything does come together, spelled out in its own frustratingly roundabout way, as a good an example of this something-from-nothing stuff we can ask for from the latest crop of alchemists.
"Getting" this band always wants to be an issue. Musically, they're full of shit; that's the point though. Excepter don't buy exclusively into music, but instead incorporate elements of music-- rhythm, melody, lyrics occasionally-- into their much larger project of sound. In other words, If you don't like how the band physically sounds, they're not worth your time. There's nothing to get about this band at all in that sense, since at least initially they're about sound on body, no encryption key for your pleasure, no computational step needed.
That said, the difference between Excepter and just some pleasant sound (which so much of this shit is, really) is an unspeakable logic past the entrance point of pleasure-- the multiple threads mutating and interacting with one another all the time, some the band's piecing together for us, others left for us to make sense of ourselves. I know that sounds hoaxy, but something takes "Jrone (Two)" in 15 imperceptible minutes from a beautiful mess to a beautiful mess that growls and pulsates and wades in contradiction. Something takes "The Heart Beat" from a literal, pneumatic romp into hoarse overtones and palpable hopelessness. Something takes "Jrone (Three)" from Cook's shapeless rants to the record's most telling moment of clarity, Cook singing to us, "It's not a simple formula it only is mine." That means exactly nothing to me-- just a little bit of everything.
