The list of punk bands that are significantly more awesome 33 years into their career than two years into it is very, very short. So is the list of bands that can get away with replacing everybody except one (non-singing) member. Fortunately for remarkable Dutch band the Ex, they're much more interested in expanding the horizons of their music than they are in repeating their past: they've generally discarded their entire old repertoire whenever their line-up has changed. And Enormous Door is an acrobatic, ferocious record, a welcome burst of electric noise and squealing horns from a group whose power and flexibility keep growing with time.
The only remaining member of the Ex's original 1979 lineup is guitarist Terrie Hessels; vocalist G.W. Sok left in 2009, and was replaced by the band's longtime associate Arnold de Boer. (De Boer's sly, mutterering croon isn't quite as commanding as Sok's martial two-note bark, although his piercing guitar tone is an excellent addition to the band. He also gets points for writing lyrics about recent research in embodied cognition.) But the trio of Hessels, guitarist Andy Moor, and drummer Katherina Bornefeld has been the core of the Ex since they hit their stride around 1990. They're a hellaciously tight, tough rhythm section-- they haven't had a bass guitarist since the mid-2000s, but both Moor and Hessels have started playing baritone guitar-- and most of their songs are built on Bornefeld's floor-rattling grooves.
What the Ex have learned over the past few decades is that they thrive on collaboration, especially with melodists from musical traditions that don't have much to do with their punk rock roots, and that they've got a serious taste for certain kinds of African music. A lot of their best records have been made with guests, from their two albums with the late avant-garde cellist Tom Cora to their recent recordings with septuagenarian Ethiopian jazz saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria. Since 2010, they've occasionally performed with a shifting quartet of horn players under the name Brass Unbound-- here, it's Ken Vandermark, Mats Gustafsson, Wolter Wierbos, and Roy Paci, all of whom have formidable reputations in the jazz world.
Enormous Door is essentially a document of their live act from the Brass Unbound shows: a series of big, rolling rhythms that let the horn section switch off between tightly arranged charts and headlong free-jazz battles, or let one style mutate into the other. De Boer sings on most of them; his English-language lyrics touch on consumer culture and unadventurous vacations, but they're mostly vehicles for his voice to be another rhythm instrument. (Bornefeld gets a turn at the mic too: a revved-up cover of Mahmoud Ahmed's mid-70s Ethiopian love song "Belomi Benna" with enthusiastically rolled Rs and near-hardcore double time on the choruses.) The one song reprised here from their first album with de Boer, 2010's Catch My Shoe, is "Bicycle Illusion", which is distinctly improved both by having spent a couple of years in their repertoire and by letting Brass Unbound augment the noise attack of its final few minutes.
And, at the end of the album, the Ex finally give us a glimpse of their past. "Theme from Konono No. 2" is the second song they've written around the Congolese band Konono No. 1's signature Morse-code riff; the first was on 2004's Turn, and a staple of their live shows around that time, so this is a real trip down memory lane for them. That "Theme from Konono" was an exercise in constantly building, monomaniacal intensity, but from the moment Brass Unbound stroll into "No. 2", it becomes a different kind of song: not a demonstration of sweaty power, but a raucous celebration of how much this band has changed, and what its alliances have given it.
