Pop and Jazz Reviews : Excel Finally Meets Onstage Potential

For the last half-decade or so, Excel has been one of the best L.A. metal bands you’ve never heard of, a Venice-based group grounded in late-era punk rock rather than in the fluffy banalities of the Strip, good in the recording studio but rather flat on stage. If the band was famous at all, it was for the singer’s perfect hair--a long, straight mop that the Breck girl might have envied--not for its precise, chunky skate-thrash.

Thursday at the Palace, in its first local show in six months, Excel finally realized the onstage potential that a lot of people thought it had all along. There’s a toughness now, a swagger, a shredding guitar sound, where before there was a hermetic overrehearsedness. The group has learned how to play to the pit.

It’s found the splendid possibilities in its sound, too, open and complex, based on the sort of polyrhythmic pulse you might find in Jane’s Addiction but still pushing all the right metal buttons, reverting to the punk polka beat only sometimes. The roiling masses slammed, sure, but individuals periodically launched themselves into the air, like salmon only too anxious to spawn.

And the new songs were the best of all, stunningly complicated, multipart riffs alternating with simple, powerful choruses, something sort of in a supercharged Soundgardenian groove, yet wholly Excel.