Exitmusic – The Decline Of The West

Playing EXITMUSIC's debut The Decline Of The West is like washing in a passionate wall of emotion. This male/female duo feeds their songwriting with bits of trance-like ambience (part Portishead meets Massive Attack, part Sarah Nixey meets Calico Sunset) and ethereal post-rock lendings (Blonde Redhead flirting with Viva Voce). Apparently recorded in various Los Angeles apartments, this 8-song full-length carries a lot of blissed out arrangements that slowly build into heartbreaking, atmospherically sufficating sugar pills. The duo (Aleksa Palladino and Devon Church) handle almost all of the instrumentation and share vocal duties, but the real treat is Aleksa's breathy vox weaving throughout the melancholy pocket orchestra's. Church adds a subtle amount of cocky dryness to offset The Decline Of The West's glazed charm, making the whole thing come off like a forlorn yet casually epic affair. In short, if you love dramatic/cinematic noise-pop, EXITMUSIC will delight. Without a doubt, this record wil be in the running for best DIY album of the year. "-THEBLACKANDWHITEMAG

"For some reason, Exit Music is really working for me right now ... off-kilter, post-punk atmospheric leanings, slurred vocals and a slow, moody aesthetic; this is what I want to hear right now. It's far from the summery pop I've been ingesting for the past few months, and it's not even what I'd called "fall music" (if such a classification could be made). It's darker, yeah, and beneath the loosely assembled eight tracks from the debut LP, The Decline of the West, there's a dark meticulousness that's heart-wrenching in an enchanting, hard-to-place sort of way.

That makes little sense, I think, but like Edit Music writes, "Sometimes the biggest influences are the hardest to pin down ... This is just how we process our days."

And this is just how I'm processing my days now. Sluggish, yet utterly confusing and perplexing. Soft-spoken yet frustrated and irritable. I love it. I love the extremeness of it all ... the black and white nature of every strained song, the languor that is squeezed into every song.

Exit Music sounds a little bit like old shoe gaze, a little bit like Radiohead, a lot like Galaxy 500 and Low ... you get the idea. Listen to a few tracks below and hunt this album down! Not to be missed ... I'm just at a loss for words now, and can't articulate its awesomeness appropriately."-BIBABIDI