Exit Verse – Exit Verse
“Sing a simple song,” advises Geoff Farina, halfway through this very fine debut album, “but you can’t fake dumb.” Is it really nine years since he and hid defnct brainiacs Karate last explored the jazzier, more cerebral corners of indie rock? As that telling line intimates, Exit Verse are a much more straightforward proposition – unsophisticated, however, they surely ain’t.
If cues seem to be taken from anywhere, you could point fingers at the loose-hipped shimmy of fellow punk survivors Ted Leo And The Pharmacists, with Under The Satellite and Perfect Hair particularly redolent of a certain sassy swagger. There’s nothing to trouble the bop-phobic, which may leave older fans to pine for the oblique chords of old. But pathos follows in complexity’s wake: ‘Silver Stars’ tugs so adeptly at the tearducts that you couldn’t begrudge him a single thing. “It’s so hard to change,” Farina later concludes, but he could’ve fooled us.