TERRIFYING TRANSCENDENTAL TUNE AGE
The story of EX MODELS is the story of great passions--the search for knowledge and ecstasy, the questioning of a work of rock and its potential meanings, unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind-- blowing them them like great winds, hither and thither, over great oceans of anguish and ecstasy, reaching to the verge of despair. It is also a discursive history of events attempted and conducted by various combinations of wasted stoners.
In one form or another, Shaah, his little brother Shahiin, Jayk, Miik, Zakk, had been playing in bands together since they were teenagers in New Jersey. While Zakk was at Oberlin College forming THE SECONDS with future Yeah Yeah Yeah's drummer Brian Chase, Shahiin was at Brown University drawing songs in sequencing software and culling lyrical themes from the obtuse cultural critiques of 20th century continental philosophers, eventually unifying everything with Miik, Jayk, and Shah under the name EX MODELS.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
"seizing and stretching the legacy of CBGB in its heyday: rock that's smart, skeletal, and recklessly ambitious, eager to provide an antidote to synthetic pop and self-important mainstream rock."
ROLLING STONE
"New York noise that's more Sonic Youth than Strokes...a very loud, very strange and playfully destructive album of explosions attached to titles like "Fuck 2 to the Music"... It sounds as if Ex Models are driving through the window of a jewelry store with the emergency brake still on, and in every track they back up and do it again and again and again...making Zoo Psychology a funny and relentless advertisement for atonal living." (***)
TIME OUT NEW YORK
"After going underground for a spell, Ex Models reemerge with Oneida's Kid Millions on drums and a batch of fucking severe--think early Neubauten, early DNA, early Cop Shoot Cop, early presence of life on earth-- that sort of desperation... Forget what you know about this band--it's taken a sharp left into the severe."
ARTROCKER
"This truly is the bastard child of The Velvet Underground circa mid sections of Sister Ray and White Light White Heat and most contemporarily related to the second LIARS incarnation. You remember those industrial techno tracks that made you finally turn John Peel's show off, Ex Models blow those guys clean out of their avant garde pants with this. The unrelenting taped pound actually released our two guitarists to innovate and extend tracks as they wished, rather than limit things in preset arrangements. Once again Ex Models set jaws dropping by reinventing themselves and challenging us again. The peaks reached during this set actually surpassed the standard set by the previous extraordinary Ex Models. See them."
CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES
"I saw EM live before I heard them on record and...they wanked with such ferocious power that night the jizz-tsunami was unbelievable, the way they just spilt over a stage, cleaned out their pipes, put one end of a dirty rag up their ass, pulled it out their jap's eye and exorcised their inner filth. Now I'm worried that Zoo Psychology is proving ever so useful around the house...Ex Models are in hock to nothing but their own fizzing synapses, tutored by nothing but the adrenaline and testosterone coursing around their nubile young bodies. Each moment's capability to either explode or derail itself into silence is seemingly down to whether all four EMs are pulling together or apart, whatever unmediated impulse is buzzing within them..."
BLENDER
"At last the no-wave revival has produced a band with the genuine weirdness to match the original late-70's movement and the furious chops to follow such later jazzcore bands as John Zorn's Naked City... The disc last only 20 minutes, but it would take weeks to unravel all the hypertense riffs and squeals."
KERRANG!
"Art-rock pushed to the extremes of sound and tipped over the edge of insanity. Each choppy outburst of noise makes no sense and yet with each yelp, bass throb and tsunami-like wave of guitar and incessant pounding, everything becomes clear. Confusing, chaotic, and utterly mesmerising." (KKKK)