Premiere: ExSage, ‘Bad Seed Baby’

Kevin Bronson on September 27th, 2016

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ExSage is the next-stage music from Kate Clover (formerly Betuel) and Tim Foley, who emerged in 2013 under the name Cobalt Cranes and in two albums quickly outgrew the garage-rock scene in which they were lumped. They were shoegazing as Cobalt Cranes as recently as January, but between the couple’s break-up, Clover’s change in geography and the new direction of their continued creative alliance (detailed in a May interview here), ExSage was born. Or, rather, seemed to overtake them like the howling winds of the Mojave.

ExSage’s debut EP “Out of the Blue,” out next month, was made with producer Alain Johannes (Queens of the Stone Age, Mark Lanegan, PJ Harvey) and comes at you like a desert-baked version of indie guitar-slingers like the Duke Spirit, the Kills, Sons & Daughters and the Prids. Or maybe X on a road trip in the wilderness beyond Joshua Tree. The EP’s second single “Bad Seed Baby” is a mouthful of foreboding with a sour aftertaste. “It’s a love song with a dose of revenge,” the band says. “It’s about the part inside of us that wishes we could change the past but instead focuses on the future to shape it the way we’d prefer. The song started with a riff that was our take on something the Misfits might have done. Then we put a guitar line that had more of a desert-noir, psychedelic feeling.”

||| Stream: “Bad Seed Baby”