Some of you who already know Exitmusic might disapprove of their music in advance, by virtue of demographic. They’re a “celebrity band,” you see. I believe, however, that this is a moot point. For those of you unfamiliar with Exitmusic, read about it yourself: send your probes into the first few hits of the Google Machine and you’ll see that the story of Aleksa Palladino and her husband Devon Chruch is the hook for every article about the band. But who cares. In my humble opinion (now foisted upon you, meek reader!), Exitmusic’s product thus far has been too excellent to be relegated to mere Palladino “side project.” At this point, I would not be stunned to see Palladino’s primary career become one of the stage rather than the screen.
What’s most remarkable about Exitmusic is how they can flirt with aesthetic peril yet escape unscathed. Their first music video, for “The Sea,” consisted of a collage from Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, which could have come off as presumptuous and damning. Preposterously, it works; it triumphs, even. Meanwhile, the video at hand, for “The Night,” has a second or two that treads mighty close to last year’s Lars von Trier film Melancholia. A lesser band would look foolish openly mingling with such mighty auteurs (see Thrice’s silly album Vheissu, which attempts to make something of Thomas Pynchon’s V), but Exitmusic manages to fend for itself, which is due in no small part to Palladino’s strangely saintly, though gruff, performance. And as for Devon Church, we see that he is a master of reverb here — an epithet he duly earns — and manages to frame his wife’s voice in a well-conceived and purposeful vision.
What’s also nice (and, indeed, possibly due to Palladino’s acting pedigree) is the clarity and confidence of the video itself. Directed by WIll Joines, the video is of unabashedly high production value, which may put off some modern children of lo-fi fuzz, but the images bear the clarity well. Let’s thank Aleksa’s acting chops, and long brown shocks, for that.
Exitmusic’s first LP, Passage, was recently released by Secretly Canadian.
• Exitmusic: http://exitmusic.bandcamp.com
• Secretly Canadian: http://www.secretlycanadian.com
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