It’s always good to hear new music, and equally good to hear a band that is a bit different and willing to walk their own path, something that Ex People are happy to do with their first full length release ‘Bird’. The LP starts of with a solid and assured start in ‘Not A Drill’, with the band laying down what turns out to be the template for each of the remaining eight tracks of the album; the bass is heavy, the guitar fuzzy, the drums simple and pounding, and the vocals clean and slightly ethereal. Unfortunately, that formula was rather rigidly stuck to from track to track, and it became hard to work out where one finished and the next began apart from the couple of seconds of silence from the speakers between numbers.
‘Without’ faded into ‘Over’ and then into ‘Dread’ with each sounding like they were different movements of a single composition, and simply editing out the breaks would have given it the feel of a slightly self-indulgent Electric Wizard release, albeit with vocals that weren’t muffled and hidden way back in the mix. That same hypnotic (or repetitive, depending on your point of view) technique was even more apparent and most effective in ‘The Host’, a track that was for me the highlight of the album, stacking up well against the likes of Windhand for a melancholy beauty. Unfortunately the rest of the album again merged into a bit of a lo-fi drone, and whilst the plodding beats had me nodding along, despite listen after listen, I found it hard to discern one track from another; none were bad, just none stood out and demanded my undivided attention.
It’s hard to put the sound of ‘Bird’ in a particular pigeon hole, falling amongst and meandering between assorted sub-genres. If you were to see the group on stage wearing Pentagram shirts, you’d likely be happy to call them a Doom band; drape them in floppy Cobainesque t-shirts and they’d be Indie-darlings lauded in the NME as the latest next great thing at Reading Festival; and if you were to clad them in black and get them to back comb their hair they’d be a wow at the Whitby Goth Weekend. I could easily imagine them opening for anyone from Uncle Acid to Placebo, and whilst that will undoubtedly give them a potentially greater appeal, it made me feel that Ex People were still experimenting with their identity, meaning that for me ‘Bird’ was as much about potential for the future as it was a self-contained success. I do, however, look forward to seeing how their next album will sound, and what direction it may take, and if some live dates appear on the horizon, I would not be averse to catching them on stage.
(6.5/10 Spenny)
https://www.facebook.com/expeopleband
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