Looking at the visage of Excepter's Sunbomber album, you can see a bit of the cover of Black Sabbath's Paranoid looking back at you. While both groups are calling out to you through a misty haze, Excepter tends more towards Danceteria than doom metal. Held together by John Fell Ryan and Dan Hougland with a number of rotating members augmenting the New York City-based group, Sunbomber feels like an effort to create an ever-flowing and evolving sound that's grounded in solid electro rhythms. This makes for a kind of sonic schizophrenia, one that's invested in the tropes of electronic dance music, but also in the world of loose musical abstraction, a connection solidified by the group's ties to fellow NYC psych travelers, the No Neck Blues Band. The band's hypnotic beats are certainly of the right stock for dancing, but there's an element of entrancement that confuses simple distinctions like mind or body music.
Excepter, like many groups exploring psychedelic electronic music, are somewhat confusingly pegged with the tag of 'noise.' Sure the ties are there — Excepter has put out releases with both Load and Fusetron — but there's nothing on Sunbomber to suggest anything random, malignant, or lacking in purpose. Certainly there's a lot to be confounded by — twisting, moaned vocals, dueling synth hooks, and electronic washes abound — but it all points back towards the aesthetic the band forges on the whole. It's somewhat unfair to a group who's exploring and making something vital of a genre that, for the most part, is artistically stagnant, as it's more of an effort than it seems. Take for instance Sunbomber's concluding track, "The Sun Bomber," which feels grounded more in the earlier and more celebrated beats of Dr. Dre, taken to their logical, if spaced-out, Funkadelic conclusion. What people find noisy about Excepter I may never understand, but with bands like this there's always the promise of taking old forms and forging out of clichés something new and exciting.
1. One More Try
2. Second Chances
3. Bridge Traffic
4. Dawn Patrol
5. The Sun Bomber
More about: Excepter
