In 1982, the Ex named its second album History Is What’s Happening. Four and a half decades since the band’s founding and a couple up-endings of the world order later, the Amsterdam-based quartet remains unerringly perspicacious. The 10 songs on If Your Mirror Breaks are by turns unsparing and surreal takes on the tasks of witnessing and persisting in overwhelming times.
The Ex is ready to face the conflict on opener “Beat Beat Drums.” But certainty is a luxury soon lost; just one song later, guitarist/vocalist Arnold De Boer sounds like he’s drowning as he tries to make sense of a catastrophe in which everything is where it’s not supposed to be and nothing is nailed down. No wonder that he sings in another song about wanting to grow up to be an apartment block; bricks stand a better chance than flesh and blood in this world. The group’s other vocalist, drummer Katherina Bornefeld, gets just one song, “The Wheel,” but it’s History Is What’s Happening’s philosophical center. In the face of internal and external change, neither of which can be denied, she casts her lot with the ever-emerging life force.
But you don’t turn to the Ex for thoughtfulness alone. The band’s very sound, an intricate system of interlocking rhythms and jagged textures, embodies that living energy. Bornefeld’s clattering beats are ruggedly undeniable and forever non-standard; she’s probably the best person on earth to sit behind the kit whenever some wiseacre yells, “More cowbell!” The guitars of De Boer, Terrie Hessel and Andy Moor stake out an immense dynamic range, battering one moment and dropping to flickering sparks the next. Sometimes it feels like they’re going to crash and collapse, but each flirtation with entropy resolves into a reenergized surge.
If Your Mirror Breaks is too honest to lie to you about the times, but so exhilarating that it makes you believe that the truth will make it through. [Ex]
—Bill Meyer
