EXEK - Good Thing They Ripped Up The Carpet

The fourth album from Australia's smartest/funniest band (winners of the tallest giant competition) experienced some kind of hero's quest making its way here. The first copies shipped our way a few months back arrived as an amorphous blob, seemingly sent via the sun, and thus melted into unrecognisable and certainly unplayable shapes. Well, of course - the band describe the record as 'phantasmagoric' (meaning to shift or change), and i suppose you find metaphors wherever you look for them... As with their previous three records, Good Thing... represents a unique and often absurdist deconstructing of post punk aesthetic in the truest sense of post punk - ie by defying expected orthodoxy. Exek don't sound like many other bands, though they have the DNA of a good few all-timers. While the monochrome ghosts of PIL and Pere Ubu loom large, there's also a sense of Eno's pre ambient art rock refractions, Residents iconoclasm and a very much unavoidable dub-wise foundation. These songs are also much more melodic than was evident on previous outings, vocalist(+/guitarist & producer) Albert Wolski twisting perfectly phrased witticisms around some knotty and unexpected hooks, embedding themselves like a claw hammer. There's a dream-like logic to Wolski's lyrics, sort of a Dada-realism that hops between timelines and pop culture references in mysterious and effortless ways. Without the words, these songs would still be excellent and interesting, but with them, Good Thing... becomes a tapestry of possibility. No doubt one of my most listened to records this year. Maybe it could be yours too?