In the four years since they introduced their stripped-down rock ’n’ roll to Knoxville audiences, Ex Gold has built a reputation for coupling smarts and skill with the familiar sound of power chords and chant-alongs. But for anyone who walked away thinking they’d seen a fairly basic punk-rock set, guitarist and vocalist Chris Rusk seems fine with that, too.
“Most of my favorite music is made by people who hardly know how to play guitar or drums, and I wanted to do something like that,” Rusk says. “It’s overproduced to sound dumb.”
The band’s focus on simplicity extends even to its origins in 2012, when Rusk—an in-demand drummer known for juggling multiple projects, most famously Royal Bangs and most recently indie startup band Caps—found his musical output slowed by unpredictable food-service shifts. Hoping to outsmart his scheduling complications, he sought out bandmates with no other musical commitments, and Ex Gold quickly came together, with Rusk stepping for the first time into the frontman role.
The lineup has changed almost entirely since then, currently featuring bassist Kelsey Tanner, drummer Zach Gilleran, and Rusk’s longtime collaborator Sam Stratton on guitar. (The no-other-bands stipulation has also fallen by the wayside; Gilleran drums for local notables Sweet Years and Guy Marshall, and Stratton fronts Wife Pile and plays with Rusk in Royal Bangs.) But the concept behind Ex Gold has stayed the same, offering a welcome musical extension of Rusk’s own ebullient deadpan.
“I’m a Man”—arguably Ex Gold’s signature tune, if only because a 2013 SoundCloud demo is their only available recording—offers a ready example of the band’s sensibility. Like many of their songs, it centers around mantra-like repetition of the title, eventually elaborated on: “And I walk down the street/And I walk down the street/And I shit and I eat/And I shit and I eat.” It’s a simultaneously earnest and mocking expression of clueless masculinity, but it also hints at something more ambiguous as it wraps up.
It’s hard to get a straight answer from Rusk about his songs’ serious undercurrents, but it’s clear the ironic distance falls intentionally short of parody. Instead, Rusk describes his character in Ex Gold as one that “14-year-old me wanted to hear.”
“I didn’t want to think too hard, I wanted to be dictated to about something that was really simple and exciting,” he says. “I’m not making fun of it. I love that stuff.”
This deceptively considered approach also extends to the music itself. Rusk and Stratton cast Ex Gold’s writing process as the most painless in a musical partnership that dates back to their childhood, owing largely to the simplicity of their chosen format. But the band’s self-imposed constraints run deeper than simply emulating specific bands or songs; they’re more likely to seize on a specific flourish or happy mistake within a single track, then build an Ex Gold song around the opportunity to replicate it.
“It’s very conceptual. We put ourselves in this tiny, tiny box,” says Stratton. “It’s an emphasis on [musical] devices. ‘You know when songs do this thing? Let’s do that thing over and over again.’”
“It’s surprisingly methodical—surprisingly thought-out for what you’re hearing,” Rusk says. “All of our favorite punk groups, they were art-school kids.”
After years of amassing these songs (including many more that were abandoned as their novelty wore off) Ex Gold is finally putting the finishing touches on its debut album, recorded by Pilot Light owner Jason Boardman. They hope to release it in April on Boardman’s Striped Light Records. But for now the only way to catch them is at one of their tight, infectious live sets, like next week’s spot alongside Sweet Years, Peak Physique, and Tree Tops at this semester’s WUTK Exam Jam.
Asked what Ex Gold’s set might have to offer stressed college students, Stratton helpfully points to their cheerfully nihilistic song “You Don’t Matter.”
“Whether you choose to think of it as a reality check, or an incentive to try harder—either way, you don’t matter,” he says.
Ex Gold plays WUTK’s Exam Jam fundraising concert with Sweet Years, Peak Physique, and Tree Tops at Scruffy City Hall on Thursday, Dec. 1, at 8 p.m. Admission is $5.
Nick Huinker is fortunate to have spent the past 15 years living and covering Knoxville’s near-constant DIY music renaissance. Once a year he does his best to return the cultural favor as producer of the Knoxville Horror Film Fest; most of the rest of the time he’s of limited use.
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