“Wah not again” he cries pulling this album out of its envelope and clapping eyes on cover art. This really is getting beyond a bloody joke. Think back to Origin and their demo ‘A Coming Into Existence’ in 1998 and then wonder if you have seen this again? Yep, well observing metal heads will also think ah, Mithras and oh yes Razor Of Occam but that is not all, there is Brand X, Mr Hermano, Nebelnest, Shalabi Effect and Space and now of course there is Exxasens. Let’s bloody well hope the music is a bit more original than that chuffing artwork!
This combo with the somewhat unwieldy name, come from Barcelona and have a fascination with all things from space. The song titles and descriptions give this away as we are thrust into subjects about astronauts, craters, stars, astronomers and the sort of things that Patrick Moore has been getting really excited about for what seems like centuries. I was kind of expecting this to perhaps be a cross between the Space project by Cauty and Drummond of The KLF and some of the tripped out ideas of The Gathering on their underrated ‘How To Measure A Planet.’ If somebody ever makes that album it would be fantastic, but this is not it!
What we do get is 53 minutes of perfectly acceptable but hardly fantastic angular post-rock. ‘Sky In Red’ is jaunty and moves along with a melody that stargazers and shoegazers will have encountered before by the likes of Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, there is perhaps a touch of the aforementioned The Gathering and even Kong here too and I would have taken a guess at these cosmonauts being Dutch if I had been put on the spot. Not sure about the sudden marching music at the end of the track though. My main gripe here is that it strikes that this is pretty formulaic and there is little in the way of spacey atmosphere to be found here. Ok its post rock and not space rock, I was not expecting all the bleeps, pulses and whooshes of Hawkwind but the only real opportunity taken here is a countdown on ‘Spiders On The Moon’ that gives me the astral thrust I am looking for. Danger Will Robinson, well not quite but there is more than a hint of GYBE about ‘Lost In Space’ and ‘Polaris’ (a stand out track) and perhaps I am being a bit unfair about all this as on the whole it’s not a bad listen, perhaps it’s more of a case that it’s not really for our website but things like this keep arriving on the fringes of acceptability.
I would also have appreciated this more if it had stayed instrumental but a couple of tracks add vocals, the ethnic sounding Por Que Me Llamas A Estas Horas’ particularly misplaced and seeming at total odds with the rest of the album. On the whole I have mixed feelings about this, possibly due to the actual genre, I find all this a bit samey after a while and certainly with the running time of it, this outstays its welcome. Would I give it a future listen? Possibly although not whilst watching the sky at night and wondering if anything is out there, Beyond The Universe is just not ‘Stellar’ enough.
http://www.myspace.com/exxasens
http://www.consouling.be
