The Ex + Brass Unbound + Zun Zun Egui – Bristol Fleece

The Ex

January 29th 2010

There’s a keenly felt sense of anticipation in the Fleece this evening. As well as being the first of The Ex’s performances with the formidable Brass Unbound roster – Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Roy Paci and Walter Wierbos – the bill also features local firebrands Zun Zun Egui, a band that sorely deserve the increase in status this tour should hopefully bring. 

On paper, Zun Zun Egui are impossible to define. Try to explain their sound to a prospective listener and the sentence almost inevitably becomes tangled between brain and mouth. This evening their impact is dented a little by slightly muddy sound, at least from where I’m stood, but it does little to diminish their furious energy. Zun Zun’s frequent brilliance is hard to pin down, but partly lies in the tension between frontman Kushal’s glottal yelps and keyboardist Yoshino’s sweet, breathy vocals. Their interplay provides a consistency that allows the band space to snap seamlessly between spazzy blasts of guitar and four-to-the-floor tropical funk. Without that anchor – and indeed, without their drummer’s impressive chops – their music would run the risk of heading off in a hundred different directions all at once. Perhaps that’s a part of the appeal.

The small stage is crowded to capacity by the time Arnold De Boer introduces The Ex with a grin and a slightly sarcastic opening gambit; “This is our first show”. Even before the first note is struck Brass Unbound cut a daunting figure across half of the stage, an opposing line of trumpet, trombone and sax seemingly as prepared for war as for celebration. Once they hit full pelt the military analogy becomes even more appropriate. For a ‘first show’, the entire unit operates with an almost psychic level of precision, shifting seamlessly from furious punk thrash through sudden bursts of spaghetti Western melodrama and low-slung Afrobeat. Yet it would be wrong to call it clinical, or surgical – there’s an anarchic energy to the entire affair that seems to teeter on the edge of collapse throughout, only held together by The Ex’s shared experience and each horn player’s virtuosity.

And there are points where the bonds do seem to dissolve almost entirely – around halfway through the set everything falls away to a blaze of muddy background noise, structureless until Mats Gustafsson suddenly enters the vacant space with a furious and soulful saxophone figure. Whether it’s entirely planned or entirely improvised – or somewhere in the middle – it’s impossible to say, but it hardly matters. This is punk as it should be – a bold declaration, a drawing of the battle lines that gleefully manages to walk the tightrope between happy irreverence and deadly seriousness. I could have listened for hours.