The Ex
Dignity Of Labour

The carnage of work-related casualties populating the crime reports of our times demands, in addition to concrete and swift legislative measures, a tribute to those who have been denied the right to safety and have paid with their lives for the negligence of others.

To shout against such massacres, which have existed since the advent of factories but take on particularly distressing dimensions in the current ultra-liberal ideological context (for which an extra 0.0000000000000001% profit margin is worth more than a human life), there is this integra Dutch band, which in the 80s was a true beacon in the continental Europe's agit-prop scene. Their EP from 1983 is aptly titled "Dignity Of Labour" and is a vehement indictment of the disgraceful condition faced by a significant portion of the working class: ensuring that workers can reclaim their trampled dignity is the rallying cry of this short but substantial concept album.

The atrocious commentary unfolds in eight sequences, each more vibrant than the last: eight jolts to the conscience of the apologists of Capital above all else, eight earthquakes sparing no sonic extremism to communicate as harshly as possible the sense of fury and sorrow for a humanity that seems to have lost its moral compass. Equally divided among the worlds of Einsturzende Neubauten, Savage Republic, and Public Image Ltd, the portrayal mounted by the Ex reconciles the industrial setting of the first, the subversive edge of the second, and the hallucinatory hypnosis of the third. Clearly, the Ex possess enough personality to distance themselves from their reference models, which remain essential. The result is a small masterpiece of rage and awareness that, even if it doesn't achieve the flair or depth of the Pop Group (perhaps the highest modern expression of anti-capitalist avant-rock, both in form and content), skillfully avoids the rhetoric of the Crass, thus earning an honored place in the gallery of openly political new-wave albums, if only for the honesty and conviction that fuel the work.

Disconnected polyrhythms, collapses of metal sheets, machinery that at times stalls and at times proceeds methodically and unperturbably, thumps of presses, roars and clangs, defaced and unrecognizable instruments, guitars mimicking the screeches of grinders or the fumes of gas leaks or the piercing trajectory of laser beams: everything comes together to effectively convey an allegory of the times, the sounds, and the spaces characterizing a workday in a factory.
Recorded in an abandoned warehouse, live and in a single session, it also stands as a vivid testament of an era (the 80s), too often dismissed as "a period of retreat," yet in reality, unique and unrepeatable in its ability to reconcile social engagement, existential reflection, and formal research, even in "marginal" lands like the Netherlands of the Ex or the Italy of the CCCP (who in '83 were working on the immense "Affinità/Divergenze").