cex

maryland mansions

'How do you describe Cex? The birds-and-the-bees method simply will not cut it in this instance. Cex isn't even something that you have to see to understand. It's something you need to hear.

Checking out the song titles won't get you too far, seeing as how they read, "Drive off a Mountain," "Take Pills," "Kill Me" and so on.

Maybe Cex can be best described as an odd but seamless combination of Trent Reznor and Eminem. It's not quite industrial and not quite rap - but elements of both exist in varying proportions from song to song.

Rjyan Kidwell, the brains behind the band, admits that "Maryland Mansions" is one of his most downtrodden and depressing albums to date, claiming that this record deals with hard times he was having in his hometown in Maryland and how he needed to flee to the West Coast.

The trouble is present in the lyric, the tone of the vocals and even the homemade artwork, which Kidwell put together.

He hones his craft on laptop-generated sounds and spoken word, bordering on rap, song stylings. The way standard instruments are thrown into the mix, giving it a thin rock basis, puts the album in the category of Nine Inch Nail's "The Downward Spiral."

He says that he's a "young dude who is just trying things out," so expect the Emersonian maxim of consistency to apply in this case. To use a worn analogy, he's breaking out of the box.

What happens on "Maryland Mansions" will not be true of any of his future or previous releases. It's all trial and error, without the grand scope of creating an album that will revolutionize the world of music.

Although he laughs at the emo moniker that gets tossed around so much that it has become meaningless nowadays, this album is more of a gut reaction than nearly any other album that gets pinned down by that label.

So, perhaps the best way to describe Cex is that it is feeling over form or function. It's hedonistic music that proves that hedonism can be much more than superficial.