Pitchfork

Belgian author and Situationist International member Raoul Vaneigem once wrote, "People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths." In the early 1990s, rock critic Greil Marcus used this metaphor as a jumping-off point for an essay about "modern cannibalism," including James Dean burgers, Sid Vicious burgers, and Jim Belushi burgers. Marcus even quoted Lester Bangs on imbibing bits of Elvis Presley's entrails: "SO YOU'VE ACTUALLY GOTTEN TO EAT THE KING OF ROCK 'N' ROLL!"

All of which may or may not explain the new video for Excepter's "'Burgers (Medium Rare Edit)"-- though if you'd expect any band to know what the fuck I'm talking about, it's this chaotic Brooklyn electro-acoustic improv group. From their forthcoming Debt Debt, "'Burgers" has a druggy bass groove in keeping with the more approachable side Excepter showed on Alternation tracks like "Ice Cream Van" and, especially, "The Rock Stepper". A choir of chipmunk vocals befitting Dan Deacon or Battles (please god, not the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie soundtrack) swirl around frontman John Fell Ryan's megaphone mumblings. The video shows the band doing some simple, eerie choreography as Ryan gets set to devour a pile of dripping 'burgers. If the apostrophe is meant to imply something, um, cannibalistic, then these dudes are part of a proud tradition.

[from Debt Debt; forthcoming on Paw Tracks]