ALBUM REVIEW: Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart – Ex Everything

EX EVERYTHING reside in the Bay Area and within that they make angry, mathy, post-hardcore music for the masses that are willing to seek change. The quartet are for those ready to engage and take action; composed of current and former members of the likes of MERCY TIES, EARLY GRAVES and more, the four of them are creating with bellies full of spite. Now they release their debut album Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart, a title that alone invokes a dire sense of urgency before a note is even played. 

The Reduction Of Human Life To An Economic Unit gives the listener a good five minutes to get acquainted with the mathy and vexed attitude of EX EVERYTHING; they showcase a pace that can only be kept up for so long but is perfect for a live setting that begs for a scrappy audience. Detonation In The Public Sphere is an early outlier on the record, running away quickly with little control. It doesn’t take listening to the tracks to know that the landscape that the quartet see is a bleak one – you can get that from the titles alone. A Sermon In Praise Of Corruption is when they wade through the morbidity around them, not exuding any of it themselves but attempting to expose it instead with their choppy and angular approach, singing “We have not overcome this repugnance”. 

Slow Change Will Tear Us Apart is sticky, there aren’t many songs within it that won’t shove their serrated claws into your brain, too stubborn to loosen their grip. Often though they look the same, have similar dimensions, it’s the aesthetic which is exactly what will try and make this symbiotic bond with you. To be so distinctive is remarkable, but isn’t that the aim of anything math rock adjacent? Regardless it sticks out like a sore thumb. The Last Global Slaughter and Plunder, Cultivate, Fabricate close things out as a team, a dystopian progression in a ferocious fashion. They’re the culmination of the warning signs that flag up from the beginning of the record, tying things up with only devastation in the wake of it. 

EX EVERYTHING have come up with a great idea that works with what they aimed to do with this band: be relentlessly fast and destroy in order to create — that they’ve achieved. Something’s missing though, a sense of nuance, everything you will hear throughout Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart comes from the very same place of rage as the last, setting the album up for an exhausted listen. A good foundation for a project that is destined to end up in the fallout of its own destruction. 

Rating: 6/10

Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart is set for release on November 10th via Neurot Recordings.

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