Music Review: Rips

Mary Timony has had the kind of career that most musicians can only dream about. The Washington, DC, native has fronted two great rock bands in Helium and Audioclave and has made major contributions to both Wild Flag and Sleater-Kinney. Her new band, Ex Hex, continues Timony’s run of consistently excellent rock music. Ex Hex’s first album, Rips, rocks—hard.

Ex Hex’s obvious main stylistic predecessor is the feminist garage rock of Sleater-Kinney, though Rips also draws from several other influences such as Timony’s childhood DC punk idols Bad Brains and Fugazi. The songs are all punchy, no holding back, rock tunes, and they are about as well-crafted as any rock songs that have been released this year. Timony has eschewed the psychedelia and folk that characterized some of her earlier work with Helium and Audioclave in favor of a crunchier, more aggressive sound. It definitely works wonders. Every song on Rips is uniformly solid: there is not a truly bad song in the bunch. Rips is a tight set—only about forty minutes—and it is one of those albums where any song could be a single, especially “New Kid,” a fun highlight which explores themes of disassociation from the maddening crowd.

This is not the album to go to for sonic diversity. Every song is the same pure blast of adrenaline, with a few slower tracks thrown in to shake things up. Needless to say, Ex Hex’s best songs are those that really jam. Along with the aforementioned “New Kid,” other highlights include rollicking roller rink anthem “Radio On,” furious album opener “Don’t Wanna Lose” and the sneering and condemnatory “How You Got That Girl," the best of Rips' many tracks dealing with explicitly feminist themes. This is an album of remarkable precision: every song is arranged meticulously, and each has just the right ratio of polish to scuzz. As such, even the worst song on Rips is fairly solid: that track would be the first single “Hot and Cold,” whose plodding tempo (at least compared to the rest of the album) just feels out of place next to the rocking vibes of the rest of the album. On its own merits, though, the track is perfectly pleasant, although it disrupts the album’s cohesion.

Overall, Rips rips and shreds and jams and thrashes. It is an album that demands to be heard, though it lacks the anger of similarly styled bands like the previously noted Sleater-Kinney and British outfit Savages. Rips, though its subject matter can be dark, is fundamentally a joyous album—the product of a frontwoman who truly loves creating music.