During a recent set by the Brooklyn improv band Excepter, a friend turned to me and said, "Okay, I think I get it now. They're a really scary white dub band." This was the first review I'd heard of Excepter that didn't include a perfunctory insult, a reference to a drug experience the writer had probably not had, or the invocation of high-level principles in mathematics. It was also the first that seemed primarily interested in how the band sounded. Then again, their impact is often extramusical; their records and performances disquieting on a conceptual level because they're as mystically alluring as they are alienating. The lyrics are a mash of personal discomfort (bad roommates, shitty jobs) and religious moaning; the musicians sound not only indifferent to each other, but to themselves (and, sometimes, to the whole project of "music"). Unfortunately, that's a hard quality to sum in words, so die-hard fans usually sound even more full of shit than detractors accuse the band of being.
They'll never be easily digestible, but they have been increasingly succinct and organized. Alternation, from 2006, actually had a chorus or two; 2007's cassette-only (but readily e-pirated) Tank Tapes and the recent "'Burgers" b/w "The Punjab" 12" show what they do best without forcing listeners through the murk so imprecisely revered by devotees. Talking about Excepter as "unbound" or "free" is flattering, kind of-- but in light of their last several releases, it's also wrong.
Frontman John Fell Ryan once described his persona as "like Jim Morrison waiting for a bus." Which is unequivocally funny-- a quality more obvious in their recent music than ever. But the delivery's always deadpan and dark. After seven minutes of "'Burgers", the half-assed funk drumming and woozy bell tones that at first sounded silly become disorienting and weird; Fell's mechanical back-and-forth with female chorus of Clare Amory and Lala Ryan about flipping burgers ("Flip those Burgers" / "Turn the patty over") is as ambiguously humorous and depressing as it scans. "The Punjab" works an irresistible and surprisingly determined Pakistani-sounding house loop, dressed only in some hand drumming and a robot voice. The robot sounds confused and vaguely angry. This is their banality at its best: a stoner's nightmare of being stuck slaving at a fast-food restaurant (and sounds just as nauseating), and the half-fascinated, half-xenophobic surreality of wandering into a bodega in the ethnic neighborhood across town.
Tank Tapes displays Excepter's more inarticulable qualities. It's not nearly as immediate as "'Burgers" or "The Punjab", but it's stranger, looser, more beautiful. Their greatest ambition, I think-- and I've said this before-- is to try to hint at music rather than actually play it. True, self-aware incoherence is still incoherence, and Excepter's missteps are legitimately embarrassing. The gray area between is what's exciting-- the half-formed tracks of funk, ethno-bounce, reggae, and rudimentary techno; the moans, the Ouija that finally yields spirits, the hokum that starts to make sense. "A really scary white dub band," true, but the scary-- and thrilling-- thing about Excepter's music is that dubs are an erasure of an original and Excepter, at their best, sound only half-there to begin with, no more, no less.
