‘‘The new record from Dutch veterans The Ex is quite oddly packaged. It looks like someone has obtained the design by coding a Design-Your-Album-Cover-Automatically programme and then setting the controls to Mid-1980's, Obscure, and Rough Trade. From the very plain typefaces to the choice of images, it manages to look completely outdated, and yet to completely suit their (timeless) music at once. The Ex, you see, are No Ordinary Band. Would anyone else not just continue but actually kick off a whole new period of frantic activity having just lost their lead singer a full thirty years after he co-founded the band? Unlikely. Yet that is exactly what The Ex have done, and "Catch My Shoe" is the triumphant result.
Showcasing their very rhythmic brand of art rock, which references The Fall as much as it does Sonic Youth and Joy Division as much as it does The Slits, "Catch My Shoe" is a relentless, syncopated, driven record, filled with incredible jazz sax and trumpet leads and astonishing lyrical concepts which disturb and emphasise the hypnotic rhythmic sway. Arnold De Boer, the replacement for the departed vocalist G W Sok, is a past collaborator with The Ex, and this familiarity lends the resulting ensemble some significant chemistry. While not quite as outstanding an experience as The Ex live (definitely, absolutely and utterly NOT TO BE MISSED), this is easily one of the best post punk / art rock records which will be released in 2010, and a creative high point even for these old hands.’’
Eddie Thomas - Subbacultcha.
Showcasing their very rhythmic brand of art rock, which references The Fall as much as it does Sonic Youth and Joy Division as much as it does The Slits, "Catch My Shoe" is a relentless, syncopated, driven record, filled with incredible jazz sax and trumpet leads and astonishing lyrical concepts which disturb and emphasise the hypnotic rhythmic sway. Arnold De Boer, the replacement for the departed vocalist G W Sok, is a past collaborator with The Ex, and this familiarity lends the resulting ensemble some significant chemistry. While not quite as outstanding an experience as The Ex live (definitely, absolutely and utterly NOT TO BE MISSED), this is easily one of the best post punk / art rock records which will be released in 2010, and a creative high point even for these old hands.’’
Eddie Thomas - Subbacultcha.
