Excel: The Other Kind of Los Angeles Metal

Excel is the best metal band you’ve never heard of, a bunch of Venice skate-dudes with crunchy riffs, tightly structured songs and politically charged lyrics whose alienation can remind you of great punk-rock. This is the other kind of Los Angeles metal, more akin to such former local bands as Slayer and Metallica than to the coiffured hard-rockers who throng the Sunset Strip.

At the Country Club on Saturday, in front of a Venice wild-style graffiti mural, Excel played its first local show in ages. The sound was as clear as on both of its albums. The people in the slam pit chanted along to everything (the band didn’t even bother shouting the choruses) and guys dove into the crowd both from the stage and from the tier of tables behind the pit. The club was hot enough to steam broccoli.

Still, Excel’s showmanship isn’t up to its musicianship: In the five years it’s been together, the band has only performed live a handful of times, and it shows. The interminable waits between songs all but destroyed the momentum of the set.