“the tone is patchy, rather than sustained, and in the end, the writing is just too erratic”–A Perspective Employer Regarding The Work of Mike Powell

Subtitled Memoirs of a Doper for comic effect—or …Shroomer or …Horror Fetishist or I Wanted to Be A Teenage Caveman For My Half-Birthday but Instead I Got a Credit Card and am Considering New Investments on My Vanguard Account or Gobble, Fucker—

Excepter’s Alternation: new drugs for the old skin. What draws me to Excepter is that their music is impossible to take for granted. I don’t want to get grandiose about the band, but I saw a video of a woman giving birth over the weekend, and I couldn’t help but think of Excepter’s music: it’s not about the moment when the cord is cut and life is re-focused, but about the humid, protracted time before it comes. They do not fuck on the first date, I think, because they want you to really understand what happens during the courtship; when it’s time, the fruit has practically weighed the branches to the ground. So when I say “take for granted,” I mean that there’s a logic and progression to their sound; whereas rock bands are born under riffs, bands like Excepter (or Animal Collective, on Here Comes the Indian or Campfire Songs or their best live shows), start as a stage production of the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Unlike the Animal Collective, though, Excepter never finds full focus; on Alternation, they manage to keep a beat, and the vocals on “Ice Cream Van” even sound like Mark. E Smith’s acidic nursery rhymes, but nothing really gives in or gives way. Babies that go feet first risk strangulation. Alternation gets some of the same gangly-limbed boogie of Self-Destruction in, but the brain never kicks in. It’s why I think they belong in the hauntology pen; their sound is always a half-presence, something that never fully articulates itself. When they crest, their sound is haunted on both sides—by freaks banging rocks together at the dawn of sound, and by what their songs could be if they embraced the grooves they point to. Instead, it’s just a flopping body and SORRY MOM, I LOVE FLOPPING BODIES IN SPITE OF MORALS AND MENTAL HEALTH.