When the Ex formed in 1979, the band was more a name spray-painted on the walls of the Netherlands than an actual musical endeavor. It was the punk era, and a complete lack of musical experience didn't seem too great a barrier to overcome. The Ex made swift musical progress, though, and by the time they made their first recordings in 1980, four songs that comprised the self-released 7" All Corpses Smell the Same, they were a sturdy, rhythmic unit with a good sense of dynamics. It was the start of a prolific run that's now gone on for 27 years, putting them just behind the Fall for extended high achievement by a punk band.
Throughout their existence, the Ex have always been steadfastly uncommercial, refusing major label deals and remaining close to the radical politics that fueled them from the beginning. During their first decade, the Ex released a steady stream of albums and peripheral tracks, all on vinyl, and while the full-lengths have all found their way to CD, the numerous flexi-discs, compilation tracks, splits, and 7-inch EPs they put out remain exceedingly rare.
Singles. Period. rectifies this situation by compiling all 23 non-album tracks the band recorded from 1980-1990, nicely remastered with pulverizing low-end and liner notes so thorough they take the disc's full 70-minute running time to read. The constants across the disc are Terrie Ex's ablating guitar and G.W. Sok's dry, amelodic vocals, taking on overzealous police raids, Apartheid, the El Salvadoran Civil War, and nuclear power with motor-mouthed rage. Bass players, drummers, and other assorted instrumentalists come and go around them, and the band evolves vividly across the chronologically-arranged disc, taking the agit-funk of the Gang of Four to rougher, nastier extremes and mixing directly with the European radical groups whose causes they espoused.
In 1981, they and others squatted a house called Villa Zuid in the small Dutch town of Wormer to prevent it from being torn down, recording the scathing "Constitutional State" for a compilation meant to benefit the building, ending with Sok's declamation "A constitutional state? I guess it's too late." Years later, "Rara Rap" became something of a left-field Dutch hit for the Ex-- the band wrote the song to protest the Dutch government's failure to prevent Dutch businesses from working with South Africa's Apartheid government. In between, the Ex raised money for striking British miners and split a 7" single with the Kurdish folk band Awara, foreshadowing their collaborations with Eritrean and Congolese musicians more than a decade later.
As important as politics are to the story of the Ex, though, there's an impressive musical progression on the disc as well. The early songs are brittle, nominally funky punk tunes with the occasional lead guitar phrase and arid production. By the time they got to 1983's "Gonna Rob the Sperm Bank", the Ex had begun to incorporate improvisation and a wider range of timbres into the sound. That song's razor-toned guitar onslaught is underpinned by a nasty, industrial bassline and Sok sounds strangely at home lost in the maelstrom. "Lied der Steinklopfer" features a demonic horn arrangement and tape distortion, while Awara's violinist contributes a haunting solo to "Enough Is Enough", otherwise a frenzied beast of rhythm with what sounds like two simultaneous basslines crunching and grinding away at the utterly locked-in drums.
The hard groove is even more terrifying on "Long Live the Aged", and one thing that this disc makes abundantly clear is that, even on their early releases, the Ex were never slack about their playing or arrangements, apparently realizing that if their songs weren't going to be catchy pop tunes, they needed something else for listeners to latch onto. The strategy worked, and there's not a moment here you could call tepid. Even the bad ideas, and there are a few, are executed with intensity and passion and usually yield at least a good drum beat. The Ex recorded some great albums in the 1980s, Pokkeherrie chief among them, but Singles. Period. is the strongest introduction to the band's early work available.
