- Ahead Of Two Thoughts is the second album from Melbourne band Exek, following on from their 2016 LP Biased Advice. It was released by W. 25th, the new music sub-label of San Francisco based archival label Superior Viaduct, best known for reissuing material by bands like Suicide, The Fall, DNA, MX-80 Sound and many more of similar post-punk pedigree.
Post-punk is a hard genre to approach critically, both as a listener and a performer. It has been
adopted into the upper-echelons of popular music since arising from many historical contradictions and tensions at the end of the 1970s, as the exploitation of avant-garde and marginalised aesthetics that had traditionally been excluded from punk music canon. Post-punk incorporated elements of experimental music, disco and dub-reggae, and embraced pop spectacle and modernist ideas. Today, waves of “post-punk revival” bands regularly break into the Top 40 charts, receive endemic airplay on commercial radio stations, feature in advertisements for everything from Coca Cola to Nissan, plague sound systems at youth apparel outlets everywhere and feature in major motions pictures and biopics that seek to immortalise the images of its troubled heroes, leaving the genre as a whole feeling like little more than so much musical wallpaper.
Exek’s Ahead Of Two Thoughts is the most convincing argument for a sincere reappraisal of post-punk in recent memory. U Mop lays out their fundamental sonic palette. Wolski convincingly delivers some confronting lines that could easily have sounded rather awkward, thin ghostly guitars, industrial ambience, disembodied dub-reggae bass, drained-battery synth, and a syncopated drum beat, with what sounds like a thumb piano emerging towards the end of the lumbering and lyrically vitriolic track.
The layering of Wolski’s vocals is the first clue to the meticulous production employed on the album. D.I.Y in nature, every inch of each track feels like it has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb innumerable times, with anything that might have come out too plain being painted over with another textural or melodic diversion. This shines through on the longer tracks on the album. Punishment, the first of two seven-minute-plus tracks on the record. Punishment sees Exek traverse sonic terrain that ranges from a brief fanfare, to minimal This Heat style
experimentation, into a driving krautrock cross dub-reggae infused post-punk section that lands on a gripping and catchy chorus. Flourishes of screaming industrial noise, layered vocals, tightly mixed drums and Henry Wilson’s omnipresent bass groove brings focus to sections that flirtwith nonsense.
Fluent In English offers a deep and satisfying contrast to the quiet and sparse guitararrangements, furnishing the listener with a hypnotic and ominous guitar driven track distinctly reminiscent of King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp’s lithe soloing on Brian Eno’s post-glam, proto-ambient Another Green World.
The songs burrow into your skin, they demonstrate a well-informed but original approach to the genre,combining repetitive dub influenced bass grooves, refreshingly sincere vocals, squelchy reverberated drums, subtle effect-driven guitar playing, layers of alternatingly melodic and abrasive saxophone and synthesizer, as well as many other special effects that make up the unique production throughout. Ahead Of Two Thoughts is a surprisingly affecting and memorable post-punk record.
- Jaden Gallagher.