Wherever heavy metal meets with jazz, some caveat emptor is almost sure to follow. “It’s not swing for the faint of heart,” a typical critical warning may read, like a semi-serious disclaimer on a bottle of high-grade hot sauce. “Only for fans of the EXTREME!” The custom isn’t without warrant, of course. This particular musical crossroads has long been one of outsized intensity, from Bill Laswell’s decades of outlandish experiments to the jazz-laced intricacy of prog metal and breakneck thrash. Then there’s a recent cadre, like France’s Aluk Todolo and the Netherlands’ Dead Neanderthals, that likes to dress its jazz in black, so the knotty complexity comes shrouded in steely menace. Independently, jazz and metal can be hyper-codified forms, each very selective about what gets through the gates of credibility; together, they are almost wickedly so, with a sense of self-selection as intimidating as the sounds themselves.
But Ex Eye, a new quartet featuring some very familiar names, seems determined to upend that off-putting expectation. On its radiant and righteous self-titled debut, Ex Eye—drummer Greg Fox, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, guitarist Toby Summerfield—gathers like a thunderstorm around the baritone saxophone of Colin Stetson, whose high volume and versatility are both anchor and catapult. His tightly spiraling melody during “Opposition/Perihelion; The Coil,” a long-playing fever dream of relentless drums and ascendant guitar, is the snake charmer’s ruse, the trick that tantalizes this beast of a band. On the other hand, his ability to hold and stretch a note like a bionic foghorn during “Anaitis Hymnal; The Arkose Disc” provides a canvas, gradually covered with a wash of accreting, overwhelming sound. Ex Eye slices exciting elements from a dozen extreme forms—black metal and doom metal, free jazz, hard bop, harsh noise, EDM, even 20th-century symphonies—and shapes them into seamless chimeras. These five pieces are as urgent as they are magnetic. Against incredible odds, Ex Eye is practically uplifting.
Make no mistake: The sounds here are certainly foreboding. Stetson’s bulbous saxophone tone often suggests the dying rites of some safari animal, while Ismaily’s electronics conjure insectoid swarms of Pentecostal intensity. Summerfield prefers high-treble riffs that flicker like lightning, and the hyperkinetic drumming familiar from Fox’s time in Liturgy or leading his own band Guardian Alien is omnipresent and exaggerated here.
But all four members of Ex Eye also boast pedigrees at the accessible fringes of the avant-garde. Stetson is the unlikely solo saxophone star who makes punishing records with Mats Gustafsson and pleasing ones with Bon Iver. Fox records esoteric pieces using biorhythm sensors, but he also plays with rock bands, tinkers with dance tracks, and drums for experimental music’s favorite recent gateway, Ben Frost. Summerfield hopscotches among genres and scenes, while Ismaily has backed the likes of Tom Waits and Laura Veirs.
With that in mind, these five songs never feel laborious, overindulgent, or repetitive. “Xenolith; The Anvil” even sounds like an outlier instrumental hit or, better yet, the obliterative answer to TNGHT’s “Higher Ground” and Anna Meredith’s “Nautilus”—a piece of mutated fanfare meant to soundtrack some grand conquest. Even when these songs stretch beyond the 10-minute mark, they’re busy enough to earn and maintain attention, dense enough to reward it repeatedly. “Tten Crowns; The Corruptor,” for instance, seems as drunk on Dixieland as it is high on the neoclassical metal of Yngwie Malmsteen. As the band zigs and zags, these 12 minutes fly past.
Sure, jazz and metal can have tedious rules, with minutiae-minded debates about what does or does not fit beneath each umbrella filling message boards and books alike. But at their best, both forms conjure a feeling of liberation, with sounds and ideas too immense for rock or pop strictures. The overwhelming volume of metal and the imaginative improvisation of jazz are parallel musical avenues for getting free. That’s often been lost in combinations of the two. As Ex Eye make high-volume symphonies of whatever they want, those are the values that they splice together so well. This is incredibly heavy music made light (joyful, even) by the zeal and power of its players. By plowing into, through, and ultimately out of the dark, Ex Eye is an ecstatic fusion—an exhilarating exclamation of defiance, no warning required.
