-- Joe D'Angelo, with additional reporting by Megan Hanley Hutaff
You'd assume music made by four California boys who named themselves after a philosophical movement might be some pretty heady stuff. But while the Exies aren't exactly lowbrow mook rockers, their music — straight-ahead hard rock with deft mood swings — connects on a primal level.
When asked to come up with a succinct summation for their sound, they throw around askew combinations like "right-wing feminist," "bureaucratic, democratic, NRA" and "vegetarian carnivores" before settling on the all-encompassing "rock" (accompanied by the two-fingered metal salute for emphasis).
Although their descriptions don't make much sense, the Exies' music is beginning have meaning for more than 100 radio programmers who've made room in their playlists for the lovelorn sendoff "My Goddess," the first single from the Exies' second album, Inertia.
The reason it's so difficult to boil the Exies down to a single phrase could be that album itself is an exercise in contradiction. Singer Scott Stevens' antagonistic vocals slam into root melodies unapologetic in their catchiness, making for poppy tunes with a bit of bite to them.
"Creeper Kamikaze" is one of the LP's heaviest offerings, despite its string arrangements. "Lo-Fi" features fuzzy guitar noodling beneath a retro hip-hop flow. And "Genius" invites the eerie violin back for a melancholic ballad to close the album.
Throughout the LP, one factor remains forever a constant. "No matter what we do, it's always about the melody," bassist Freddy Herrera said. "The melody has to be there."
The name Exies was taken from a group of German students who in the early 1960s adopted this shortened version of "the existentialists" for their philosophical belief focusing on individual existence, freedom and choice. They weren't just any group of students, mind you; one of them, Astrid Kirchherr, fell in love with original Beatle Stu Sutcliffe and was responsible for giving the Fab Four their trademark haircuts.
But that was then and this is now, and where once the name was collegian cool, now it often comes across as awkward, and the bandmembers find themselves having to spell it out a lot.
"I was like, 'Wow, that's weird,' " Herrera said when Stevens first came to him with the name. "You don't hear that word anywhere, so I was like, 'Yeah, that's cool.' It still took a while before I was sold on it, though."
A product of the Los Angeles glam scene, the chop-topped quartet formed in 1997 and soon found that getting a band off the ground in Hollywood isn't as easy as their rock-star dreams led them to believe.
"The music scene in Hollywood will suck the life out of you," drummer Dennis Wolfe said.
Most of the dozens of unsolicited, self-financed demo tapes the band sent out fell on deaf ears, but the Exies persevered with renewed determination.
An A&R rep from Ultimatum, the indie label owned by celebrity stable the William Morris Agency, eventually liked what he heard and offered them a deal. The label released the Exies' self-titled debut in 2000.
While touring in support of that album, the band caught the attention of producer Matt Serletic (Collective Soul, Matchbox Twenty) and spent the next year recording Inertia for Virgin Records.
Since then, they've maintained a love/hate relationship with the road. Much like a woman, as the proverb goes, they can't live with it, they can't live without it.
"The only thing worse than touring is not touring," Wolfe said. "When you're out there, you might look forward to getting home at some point. But when you're home for a little while, you can't wait to get back out on the road again. It's that constant push and pull. Some of it's amazingly fun and some of it is crushingly boring."
Exies tour dates:
- 11/19 - State College, PA @ Crow Bar
- 11/21 - Syracuse, NY @ 32 Degrees
- 11/23 - Portland, ME @ Stone Coast
- 11/24 - Poughkeepsie, NY @ The Chance
- 11/25 - New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge
- 11/27 - Kenosha, WI @ Brat Shop
- 11/29 - Milwaukee, WI @ The Rave
- 11/30 - Chicago Heights, IL @ Oasis 160
- 12/1 - Detroit, MI @ Smalls
- 12/2 - Cleveland, OH @ Odeon
- 12/4 - Wilmington, NC @ Marrz
- 12/5 - Greenville, SC @ Eastern Carolina U
- 12/7 - Hartford, CT @ WMRQ Xmas Show
- 12/9 - Washington, DC @ Nation
- 12/11 - Indianapolis @ Emerson Theatre
- 12/13 - Kansas City, MO @ Ameristar Casino Hotel
- 12/14 - Columbus, OH @ Flanders
- 12/15 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Hard Rock
- 12/18 - Fort Wayne, IN @ Pierres
- 12/19 - Grand Rapids, MI @ Intersection
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