Ex Models music is a hard pill to swallow. Very noisy, very chaotic, to many it’ll sound only like noise. Writing this feature (read it here) was reminiscent of writing the Public Eyesore article a few weeks back, where I had to find the method to the madness. Ex Models Shahin Motia is very aware that he’s going to alienate fans of the older, more danceable version of his band, but he figures that’s just the way it goes. I asked him if he thought the methodical shift from album to album to becoming a more “noise-based” band was what also drove down the band’s numbers from four to just two guitarists. “Yeah,” he said. “For me personally, I feel like Other Mathematics (their debut album) was very rhythmic, and we spent a lot of the time creating these bizarre drum patterns and threading the guitar and bass through them. A lot of that was simplified on Zoo Psychology (their follow-up) through raw power. At the end of that tour, I felt like I personally had grown tired of it. We were going into rehearsals with very little creative energy and I knew what the four of us were capable of, and it wasn’t a good feeling. I was convinced personally that I didn’t want to deal with drums anymore; I didn’t want the beat to be the thing anymore.”

Motia went on to say it’s been tough learning to play live as a two-piece. “We have played 100 shows since February and have figured out what we want to do and what we like about it,” he said. He divides the band’s audience into three groups: Those who are familiar with their old stuff who turn up and say “What the hell is this?”; another third who like the old stuff and think the new stuff is great; and another third who will have seen this incarnation of the band before and have come back for more. “The U.S. is the only place we’ve toured as a two-piece twice,” he said. “So now there are those who have seen it who were never into our older stuff. That’s cool.”

Tonight it’s Statistics and Little Brazil together at one show at O’Leaver’s. The gig is a warm-up for the bands’ upcoming joint tour, where Little Brazil will actually be acting as Statistics’ backing band. Should be a rousing good time indeed. $5, 9:30 p.m.

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