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For some reason, Exit Music is really working for me right now ... off-kilter, post-punk atmospheric leanings, slurred vocals and a slow, moody aesthetic; this is what I want to hear right now. It's far from the summery pop I've been ingesting for the past few months, and it's not even what I'd called "fall music" (if such a classification could be made). It's darker, yeah, and beneath the loosely assembled eight tracks from the debut LP, The Decline of the West, there's a dark meticulousness that's heart-wrenching in an enchanting, hard-to-place sort of way.
That makes little sense, I think, but like Edit Music writes, "Sometimes the biggest influences are the hardest to pin down ... This is just how we process our days."
And this is just how I'm processing my days now. Sluggish, yet utterly confusing and perplexing. Soft-spoken yet frustrated and irritable. I love it. I love the extremeness of it all ... the black and white nature of every strained song, the languor that is squeezed into every song.
Exit Music sounds a little bit like old shoe gaze, a little bit like Radiohead, a lot like Galaxy 500 and Low ... you get the idea. Listen to a few tracks below and hunt this album down! Not to be missed ... I'm just at a loss for words now, and can't articulate its awesomeness appropriately. - BIBABIDI
EXITMUSIC
The Decline Of The West
(2007, Self-Release)
Rating: 8.8
Playing EXITMUSIC's debut The Decline Of The West is like washing in a passionate wall of emotion. This male/female duo feeds their songwriting with bits of trance-like ambience (part Portishead meets Massive Attack, part Sarah Nixey meets Calico Sunset) and ethereal post-rock lendings (Blonde Redhead flirting with Viva Voce). Apparently recorded in various Los Angeles apartments, this 8-song full-length carries a lot of blissed out arrangements that slowly build into heartbreaking, atmospherically sufficating sugar pills. The duo (Aleksa Palladino and Devon Church) handle almost all of the instrumentation and share vocal duties, but the real treat is Aleka's breathy vox weaving throughout the melancholy pocket orchestra's. Church adds a subtle amount of cocky dryness to offset The Decline Of The West's glazed charm, making the whole thing come off like a forlorn yet casually epic affair. In short, if you love dramatic/cinematic noise-pop, EXITMUSIC will delight. Without a doubt, this record wil be in the running for best DIY album of the year. - the black and white magazine
Discography
EXITMUSIC/ THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
2007
Photos
Bio
www.myspace.com/thedeclineofthewest
Devon and Aleksa met one November on a train ride across Canada. They drank coffee all night and argued about the existence of evil. They listened to early Bob Marley and Blood on the Tracks. They were 18 years old.
Aleksa went home to New York City, where she worked as an actor. She told her mom she'd met the man she was going to marry. Her mom asked her where he was. She said she didn't know.
Devon went home to Winnipeg, where he worked in a subterranean pool hall/crack den. He saw some strange, bad things there. At night he would walk home in the ridiculous cold through a snow-covered golf course. A thick mess of stars pressed down on him and he thought about her. He left town, wandered all the way around the world and finally wound up in New York City. He found Aleksa and they moved in together and started making music on Aleksa's four track.
They moved to Los Angeles, bought a computer and began writing the songs that are now EXITMUSIC. In September 2004 they got married at a scenic overlook on Mullholand Drive. On their wedding night they drank champagne and made demo covers out of cardboard and glue and pictures they took at a train station photo-booth.
Their new album, The Decline of the West, was entirely self-produced, engineered and recorded in various Los Angeles bedrooms and living rooms. With zero prior knowledge of recording technique, their uniquely lush but lo-fi sound is astonishing.
Aleksa Palladino is a respected actress who has starred in over 20 film and television roles, including her debut opposite Scarlett Johanson in the critically-acclaimed Manny & Lo (Lo), The Adventure's of Sebastion Cole with Adrien Grenier (Mary), Todd Solonsz's Storytelling (Catharine), and the latest film by legendary director Sidney Lumet, Find Me Guilty (Marina). The new year will see her starring alongside Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and Marissa Tomei in Lumet's new film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Chris). She will also appear with Henry Rollins in the second installment of the cult horror franchise Wrong Turn (Mara), and as Sybil Vane in the avant-garde adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, by maverick director Duncan Roy.
Devon Church is rounding out EXITMUSIC's cinematic vision by writing screenplays about underground cities, 200-storey prisons, spiritual conmen, Emma Goldman, Helena Blavatsky, god in the form of a jellyfish, and the devil in the form of a tyrranical 1940's studio boss.
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