by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
For the first time in a while, it feels like something interesting is happening in British guitar music. There were certainly rumblings of intrigue with the sprechgesang prog-punk of 2019. Brief glimmers of hope lead to a moment where English rock bands could be fresh and cool again, only before the “Windmill scene’s rapid implosion, where the sound became a self-parody consisting of bad sixth-form poetry and the sort of orchestral cheese. But still, some of it must have paid off. All that name-dropping of The Pop Group, This Heat, and Slint—not to mention the endless repetition of no-wave, post-rock, and other similarly slippery genres—has manifested something. Ex Agent’s debut New Assumptions might be the result of all that endless chatter, their music existing somewhere between the slow drones of Louisville post-rock, the free-form jazz noise of no-wave, and the impeccable art punk of late-70s England.
It’s more likely the result of an ever-expressive scene blooming out of Bristol, one in which Ex Agent is deeply involved. Singer/guitarist Evo Ethel plays sax in the chamber prog outfit Foot Foot and gothic post-punk group Zalizo, guitarist Alfie Hay is part of industrial post-rockers HAAL, Eve Rosenberg plays bass with indie rockers Sunglassz Vendor, and drummer Aidan Surgey lends his distinct rattle to the melancholic trip-hop of Broadsheets. Even pianist Archie Ttweahm is a regular player in one of the city's mainstay esoteric gig nights, Improv's Greatest Hits, with the event's organiser Harry Furniss joining as a guest performer across the album on cornet. Yet even in that massive wave of bands, Ex Agent’s sail flies high. Despite strong sounds emerging from Bristol and the excellent modern post-rock blooming across England with bands like Moin, Still Houseplants, and Caroline, there’s something about Ex Agent’s music that the rest lack in their mastery of chaos and discipline, one that fuses knuckle-scraping noise with overwhelming beauty.
The feel of Ex Agents’ music has a subtle disquiet to it. Their sonic aesthetic feels like a film noir pushed deep into the absurd. Interlocking Glenn Branca guitars ruffling against drunken piano keys, slippery basslines, and the sort of drumming that’d make Charles Hayward blush. The EP is torn straight from their ever-evolving live set where song pieces and moments are traded and improvised around like frames in the editing room. The result is that same sort of impossibly tight-yet-loose chaos magic that marked out the very best of Ex Agent’s post-punk predecessors. There are slices of the maverick experimentalism of This Heat, the theatrical rampages of Dog-Faced Hermans, and the avant-jazz explorations of Rip Rig and Panic across the ep. But song to song, their sound varies wildly.
Opener “New Assumptions” has the disquieting stomp of Canry Era Nick Cave. The song gradually evolves from a tender piano piece into a theatrical noise fest complete with crushing horns that sound straight out of Peter Brotzmann. The noise returns with lead single “Jessie’s Christ” where an ever-amping guitar riff shifts into a tumbling slab of noise-rock, the bass and drums rattling against Evo Ethel's screamed vocals and interlocking guitar riffs to create an ever-unsteady rhythm. The greater surprise than this shift is how well it all works, as the song turns into a meditative slab of jazzy slowcore at its conclusion. Evo’s ranted vocals carry a genuine mania that bounces off the melancholic piano and rising horns perfectly. It’s a sharp contrast to “And The Way She Shakes His Fist At Them,” where spiritual jazz toes the line between creep and comfort. The track's rising horns offer a moment of rest, but the pulsing drums and scattering cymbals keep a slither of tension. Closer “Credit Song,” with its mix of Reich-style minimalism and Americana-indebted slowcore, could appear a tad cliché in the current landscape if it wasn’t executed so well. The gentle grace of the mathy guitar and breezy horns lulls you into a serene comfort before transforming into a discomforting swirl. It certainly helps that the track opens with a full choir of Bristol musicians, the closer to all the noise sounding like heaven’s gates bursting open after one hell of a rapture.
New Assumptions comes together as a miniature epic. The sort of one-track excellence that could line a Swans album if they put aside the drone in favour of some more free-form no-wave jauntiness. Yet what remains remarkable about this EP is it doesn’t feel like it's trying to be that. The eternal risk with experimental rock is giving in to pretension, of making music that sounds like experimentalists who’ve come before rather than achieving their own vision. Ex Agent are a remarkable group because their influences remain influences. Sporadic sounds rather than sections or passages. No song sounds like it's aping another artist, rather each is a bizarro rock gem worthy of any noise-nik’s attention.