Excepter
Debt Dept.
You'll Like It If You Like: Throbbing Gristle, Gang Gang Dance, Trent Reznor
On their latest release, Brooklyn's Excepter sounds like the art-damaged love-child of '80s industrial music and a Jamaican dub plate. Debt Dept., the band's sixth full-length release, is teeming with the kinds of skeletal, gritty electronic percussion associated with industrial acts like Skinny Puppy and Einstürzende Neubauten, but everything has been slowed down and slathered in disorienting effects. The result is a sequence of demented dirges that sound like a DJ Screw version of an early Suicide album. The only hint that humans had anything to do with the creation of these dark, bleak electronic atmospheres comes when the boys and girls of Excepter mix teems of disembodied chants and slightly verbal utterances in with their hard edged synthesizers and heavy, mechanical drum patterns. While Debt Dept. certainly isn't for everyone, it could easily be an interesting late-night soundtrack for the more adventurous listener.
- Brad Barry
Thomas Function
Celebration
You'll Like It If You Like: Velvet Underground, The Deadly Snakes, Richard Hell Though it is a part of the current wave of garage bands, Thomas Function is essentially a pop outfit, focusing on vocal hooks and shouted choruses, and it has the crisp production to support it. The presence of some older material on this, the band's first full-length album, turns out to be a blessing, as the keyboards and horns on songs like "Can't Say No" and "Relentless Machines" benefit from the record's clear, vibrant production. The latter gradually builds up from a deftly strummed guitar and rapid-fire lyrics about the presence of technology in modern life into a driving pop anthem. The song is centered on the interplay between repetitious, galloping drums, wavering keyboards and soaring vocals, making it tower over the rest of the album. With a greater focus on musicianship, lyrics and just plain audibility, Celebration catapults the Thomas Function far above its garage rock peers.
- Ben Cox
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