Review by Jonathan Geddes: Four stars
It is unlikely that there's a better setting to hear Ex Hex's music than on a Friday night in a packed, cramped and sweaty venue.
Such an atmosphere was the perfect backdrop for Mary Timony's power trio, who delivered a lean, no filler set of undiluted rock n' roll.
Timony's prior work with the likes of Helium never even winked at mainstream pop, but Ex Hex is cheerfully buying it drinks at the bar, with last year's debut album Rips and this live performance filled with catchiness.
For 45 minutes Timony, Joan Jett channelling bassist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura Harris fused the best of the Bangles, the Ramones and the Runaways into an exhilarating package, all big riffs, tremendous choruses and lashings of gleeful attitude.
While some of their songs undeniably beat a path to acts of the past, from Hot and Cold pinching the Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane to How You Got That Girl's New York Dolls inspired swagger, Ex Hex's tunes are honed to such a level that they avoid being simple imitations.
Tmony and Wright often went face to face during instrumentals, in another nod to rock convention, but some of the night's best moments came then, from a lengthy, fuzzed-up jam that closed Beast to the fired up Everywhere, aided by Harris' exuberant drumming.
The only quibble would be that Timony's vocal sounded muffled early on, but it soon settled down.
She cut a cheerful figure, dancing away at the set's end, and given the pop pleasures of the hook-laden Radio On and razor-sharp Waste Your Time she had every right to celebrate being in a band that came across as the coolest gang in town.
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