Still Thinking

Although The Ex-Optimists have a distinct sound and stage presence, I never know what to expect from their new music. And I love this about The Ex-Optimists. For instance, 2012's  Bee Corpse Collector,  nearly a decade old and half a different band ago, pays homage to swimmy-guitar college-rock radio, while 2015's  Phantom Freight  opens with a 15 minute chime-infested soundscape of "True Evil" only to be followed by 2018's angry AF full-fist, shoe-gaze rocker  Drowned In Moonlight.  Various splits and 7" releases along the way feature Ex-Ops playing post-punk thumpers ( Bee Corpse Thousand ), sweaty-stadium stompers ( Save Your Love ), and summer-love crooners ( Reruns from the '60s ). Listening through their catalogue is like reading a musical memoir of the band's influences and ideas. Life reveals itself in the progression of their recordings (2012 - poppy; 2015 - experimental; 2018 - pissed off), often telling their collective stories more throug...

Two conversational topics, we are told, should never enter the work-place: religion and politics. You might as well add to that list “mortality” -- people work too hard making a living to be reminded of their death. We don’t talk about these things because they get sticky. After all, we might disagree. We might have varying opinions. You might want to give more weight to something than I want to give weight to it. What happens when the weight you feel outweighs the weight I don’t feel? See? It’s too tricky. We might even decide we don’t like each other as much as we thought we did when we both agreed that all these schmucks ruin their black coffee with vanilla flavored liquid PVC. Man, those were the days! Back when you and I agreed on what mattered most! Pure black coffee without the frou-frou nonsense! But that all had to get spoiled when I found out you think / believe / want / pray (or don’t) for and to ______________. And now my coffee doesn’t taste the same around you. My coffee...

I studied the Russian language in college. The Spanish and French classes were more popular, so I chose the language class with the fewest number of students. That would be Russian. My teacher was a little spit-fire from Moscow named Irene Trofimova. I loved her. She hated me. She called me “Kee-van” and told me frequently, “You vill go into the vorld, and you vill die.” One day, when only the two of us attended class, she said to me, “Kee-van, vhat is this vord, this ‘hanging-out’”. As she said the word, she threw her hands in front of herself like a farmer sowing seed. I said, “It just means to spend time together. Like you and me, right now, we are ‘hanging out’”. She blushed and waved her hands in the air. “Stop it, Kee-van. Don’t say such things!” I asked where she had heard this phrase - this “hanging out”. After more blushing and hand-waving, she finally said she’d heard it in a movie. A prostitute had said it to a client. She invited him to more prostituting. They could “hang ...