Moving Units - Hexes For Exes

by Tom Mendelsohn

Art rock. That is all.

"has all the depth and staying power of an Editors b-sides album, of course, but at least Moving Units have had the decency not to sound completely like Joy Division."

Eh, the post-punkers are still at it, and they’re still aping their elders and they’re still pissing in their own gene pool. Honestly, we listen to dozens of aspiring genre-bands every month, and very few of them are doing much more than releasing duff albums on the backs of one good song and eleven other crap ones. It’s rare that you even get something released that you could call ‘average’.

That’s a bleak opening paragraph, but you’ll be glad to hear (at least if you are in a band called Moving Units) that it does not reflect the quality of the album it is meant to review. This is because, rather miraculously, ‘Hexes For Exes’ scores palpably lowly on the patented NN ass-o-meter. To dispense with the mangled syntax – it’s actually quite good. Well, it’s a qualified ‘quite good’, an archetypical ‘7/10’, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and so forth.

It’s pleasing after its jaunty fashion, with some meaty tunes and a lot of washed-out gothiness. It has all the depth and staying power of an Editors b-sides album, of course, but at least Moving Units have had the decency not to sound completely like Joy Division. Honestly, we sneer, but it is genuinely enjoyable – much more so than its thousands of anaemic, mewling relatives.

The track listing is worth drawing your attention to; ‘Crash ’n’ Burn Victims’, ‘The Kids From Orange County’, ‘Paper Hearts’, ‘Dark Walls’, ‘Nail It To The Cross’ and ‘Kings And Queens Of Nothing’ all sound hilariously like they’ve been chosen in focus groups, but we’ll let them have the benefit of the doubt and believe that they come heartfelt from the inky blackness of the lyricist’s tormented SOUL.

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