Switching the currents
Reviving the filthy crushing rock & roll of the late 80’s and 90’s, Exxyle is entering the fore, but not with some half-cooked track with reused lyrics. The Cancer Redux features Clutch style riffs revved with gasoline. It has so much horsepower, it should be illegal to put in a single.
Whether my music fits into the mainstream or not has never been a factor that I’ve even considered. This is the type of sound that vibrates in my marrow, the kind of sound that makes you remember wooden bar room floors, counters sticky with spilled whisky, the smell of chalk and pool table felt, the sting of wind burn on your cheeks from riding your motorbike. To do anything else would be contrived and manufactured.
My goal is not to be the next legendary rockstar. I mean, it would be great, but it’d be a side effect and not the destination. I need to release music into the world to find people that resonate with it, no matter their walk of life and when it reaches them, it’s vital that the songs are genuine, honest and alive.
The spine- talking about the track
The Cancer Redux is a gutting track that has a powerful bass drum punching through the vocals. The off-time signatures make the song a beast with its tail on fire. Just like the elements being sung about, the track is unpredictable, kicking the doors in for Machine Head and splices of nu-metal merged to create an energetic track.
The obvious change from full time to half time is really to juxtapose quite overtly the energy and thrill of following your impulses versus the molasses swamp-walk of being a quantified function in a greater societal system. Pay attention to what’s being said during each of those sections, and more so, the music in the background. It gets quiet in the verses which makes it easier to hear the artifacts echoing around in the background.
Those harmonics and and discords are the urges that people tend to generally ignore. What’s less obvious is the slight off-beat aspect in areas, the hi hat on the up-beat in the intro, the slightly de-synced drums in places. That is very much to make the listener feel uncomfortable, purposely disrupting the groove in places to shape the contrast with when it resolves again and barrels forward on all cylinders. It tries to create a good, exciting sense of relief when everything works in sync again, when you’ve justified your urges and stride forward with determination.
I might have had trouble at catching the sound signatures for parts of the verse, but it goes with the overall theme of the song. I don’t mind it over the smell of burning rubber after peeling away at 80 miles an hour.
The story behind the The Cancer Redux
Walking my daughter to school one day six years ago. On my way back I was listening to music, as you do, thinking about how I keep walking her to school and picking her up in the afternoon for her daily session of behavior modification into a good, obedient, conformed member of society. Listening to a random playlist of classics and old greats and when that groovy bass riff of Joan Jett’s cover of I wanna Be Your Dog came on, I knew exactly what the song needed to feel like.
By the time I got home, I had the intro’s whisper lyric already written in my head. The Cancer, like all of the songs I’ve written so far, wrote itself by way of insistence. This one wanted to be an anthem to shaking off the dead existence of conformity and obedience. When it was complete and released, I knew I had not created it to the standard that it needed to be. It wasn’t strong enough, it wasn’t sophisticated enough and that was due to my lack of proficiency in producing music.
Over the next 6 years I was doing everything I could whenever I could to bridge that gap and it resulted in a lot of false starts, dead ends and trashed songs. May 2020 saw the rebirth of the Cancer into The Cancer Redux. Now it’s ready to say what it needs to say.
Exxyle may have released only one single, but it shines through. It has a nasty riff, so its trailing mud through the minutes. As Exxyle says on his Spotify bio, it must taste like meat, beer, bikes, and babes- and it does. This song screams opening for Red Rocks festival and maybe might get the mosh going at Wacken. The song is just a teaser for what we can expect from Exxyle.
What’s coming next
I’ll be releasing a single every 5 weeks after the last one has released. That means that the next track, Line In The Sand is ready to drill into your earholes on September 10th. You don’t want to miss it. Folks can subscribe on exxyle.com to stay in touch with me and with the release schedule but also to get early access to the new tracks a while before the rest of the world gets them.
Recording will of new songs will start again the minute I can rebuild my studio (moved home recently) and will create songs like Head In A Box, a take on how TV and modern media erode the strength of will and freedom of thought as well as the title song of the album, The Hollow King. This one I’d like to leave up to speculation from the audience as to its message, based on the them of everything else I put out.
Exxyle is even open to collaborations. When asked about his current plans:
None planned or in the works. Not that I’m averse to collaboration, it’s just that I haven’t come across a great many opportunities for it and besides I’m quite specific on the music I’m making. Having a bunch of other input into a song needs to be of songs that are truly a group effort and not as close to me as the ones coming out now. That being said, I invite anyone that wants to collaborate on some ear blistering rock ‘n roll to get in touch, let’s see if there’s magic to be made
Listen to his gritty, raw and unpredictable track here:
Check out our playlists here!
Discovered via http://musosoup.com
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Self professed metalhead, moderately well read. If the music has soul, it's whole to me. The fact that my bio could have ended on a rhyme and doesn't should tell you a lot about my personality.
