Rips
*Rips* indeed. Ex Hex’s debut delivers a steady stream of muscular riffs, dirty hooks, and sticky melodies. It’s tight, lean, and a lot of fun. Made up of singer and guitarist Mary Timony (Helium, Wild Flag, solo), drummer Laura Harris (The Aquarium), and bassist Betsy Wright (The Fire Tapes), Ex Hex cross garage rock with power pop. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s done well. You can pump your fist to it while appreciating Timony’s clever and often biting lyrics and straight-ahead guitar solos. Longtime Timony fans will also notice the difference in her voice. Trading her hushed vocals for a full-throated wail, here she sounds tough and assured.
The debut album from Mary Timony's new band is the record of the summer, albeit one that's arrived two months too late—a collection of perfectly lean power-pop tunes that evoke Tom Petty and the Runaways while conjuring the unruly energy of contemporary mid-fi bashers like Thee Oh Sees.
Washington DC’s Ex Hex – aka Mary Timony, Laura Harris and Betsy Wright – are firm believers in and lifelong beneficiaries of the ecstatic potential of rock’n’roll, and they’ve produced a debut that restores transcendence to a faded idiom.
It sounds almost hopelessly out of time and there's nary an ounce of innovation, yet you can’t help but grin and love it just the same.
Before she joined Carrie Brownstein in the technicolor whirlpool that was Wild Flag, Mary Timony wrote one of the most…
Over the years, she's made more room for fun in her music, and Rips proves just how good she is at it.
“I got no regrets,” Mary Timony proclaims, midway through Ex Hex’s debut album. As with many of the tracks here, it’s a worldly-wise dismissal of some creepy ne’er-do-well, glistening with spine-tingling pop nous and punchy rifferama – but it’s hard not to hear that one line and not think of the tantalizing promise of her recently-departed supergroup Wild Flag.
Mary Timony’s terrific new band deliver a deliriously great debut album packed with succinct, speedy, powerpop treats, writes <strong>Tom Hughes</strong>