Rex

Julie + Doug Curtis + Phil

The Sunday Times, Culture section, October 5th 1997.
Stewart Lee

Late last month, Cecil Sharp House, the English Folk song Society HQ in Regent's Park, hosted the UK debut for Rex and Rachel's, twin leading lights of a hardy hybrid strain of American post-rock dynamics and folk classical sensibilities. A 500-strong crowd on plastic seating saw Rachel's showcase last year's essential Sea & the Bells album, a requiem for clipper ships made up of delicate instrumentals - guitar and drums weaving between strings and piano.
Rachel's are one of a host of uniformly excellent bands straddling their home, rural Louisville, Kentucky, and the studios and venues of nearby Chicago, who share common aims, a common ancestry and common living and rehearsal spaces. "Louisville is just ... out of it," says Rachel's guitarist, Jason Noble, "so we all take inspiration from things as diverse as 40-year-old jazz records, reading a lot of books and the climate here, which is very dramatic."
Louisville was also the home to American post-rock's pilgrim fathers, Slint, who disbanded at the turn of the decade, core members currently recording with the For Carnation, Aerial M, King Kong and Tortoise. "I saw Slint when I was 15," recalls Noble. "I could have thought: why bother playing music anymore? That's as good as it gets. But instead of being dismayed, I was encouraged."
Ironically, Noble's own previous band, Rodan, have now assumed the same mythology as Slint, disappearing after one album in 1994 to filter into the finest American bands, the folksy Sonora Pine, symphonically complex noise rockers June of '44, and the Shipping News, Noble's current collaboration with Rodan co-founder Jeff Mueller. Their debut, Save Everything (Quarterstick), is a devastating fusion of impossibly heavy guitars and baroque finesse.
Onstage, Rachel's reflect their disregard for rock conventions. Pianist Rachel Grimes scored their Music for Egon Schiele album as a live ballet soundtrack, and Cecil Sharp House saw Louisville artist Greg King back-projecting appropriate cine-images while Grimes luxuriated in the venue's grand piano. Support Rex, a New York group commonly assumed to be part of the Kentucky clique, heroically duelled with the venue's PA's volume limiter to deliver a curiously appropriate folk-tinged set of thrilling complexity. "We get described as a Chicago band back home in New York," laughs Rex guitarist Curtis Harvey. "We kind of fell into that group of musicians. I feel lucky and honoured to be part of that scene."

Curtis + Doug
Rex, whose new album, 3 (Southern), is their most accessible yet, soften and stretch the mathematical geometry of the Slint template with bizarrely successful folk and country influences. The track Waterbug's chiming music-box strings suggest Michael Nyman scoring Deliverance, while Balloon might be the year's most beautiful folk song.
Rachel's and Rex take post-rock full circle. The scene that spawned them broke rock apart, enabling its survivors to make new shapes, alongside influences from folk, country and classical music, which the dogmatists of the 1980s would have gagged on. Now they can engage the heart as well as the head.


Curtis

NME, October 11th 1997
Kitty Empire

You can't get much less rock than this. We're in a wood-panelled auditorium that feels like a school assembly hall, only it's the headquarters of The English Folk And Dance Society. There's a little box on the wall which monitors the frequencies of tonight's proceeding - and cuts out the PA if it gets too loud. Which, irritatingly, is about every two minutes during the very lovely Rex's set of intense whispers. Aaargh.
Still, in theory, you can't get much less rock than Rachel's: a piano, a violin, a viola, a bit of guitar and bass and some drums have made it over here this time (there are 17 musicians credited on their last album, "The Sea and the Bells"). They're not so much post-rock as pre-rock; making moody music for lo-fi fans who require more than a detuned banjo.
So everyone is respectfully seated and Jason Noble (guitar, mostly) is telling an extended joke about a duck, in between strung-out violin arpeggios and sad piano chords. Rachel herself sits primly at the keys, meandering through "Rhine And Courtesan" or tearful string workouts like "Second Self-Portrait Series".
Refined music. Cerebral sounds.
And then all hell breaks loose. "Lloyd's Register" starts out as a gentle meditation, but builds into a fearsome surge, all banshee strings and shipwreck rhythms making the PA fart and the box on the wall smoke. Gradually, the storm passes. All is quiet and sad once again, but a roomful of people is whooping and cheering, and you feel like telling the night porter they'll need to get some morris dancers in first thing Monday to reconsecrate the place. For it has been truely rocked.


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Photographs © janet morgan