Vex Ruffin: ‘Eulogy’
Punk helps you cut loose from your roots. Where you land is your own business. Take lo-fi riser Vex Ruffin, who turns his back on the Californian sunshine of his Chino Hills hometown and dreams himself over the Atlantic to Blighty, to a soggy Stockport or a drizzled Haywards Heath. Once there, he’ll while away the time throwing some deliberately awkward shapes and kicking the bleached ghost of Martin Hannett round a multi-storey car-park.
Back in his real home, Vex is fertile soil with a growing reputation – a onetime Cure fan with a parallel taste for Ruff Riders hip-hop, an anti-technique approach to guitar, and a wide-open yen for discovery and striking scratch-video. Potentially, it’s an interesting combination for creative confusion; especially as he doesn’t appear to be the fringe-dwelling white geek you’d expect, but a bandana-rocking American Asian with a penchant for moody or macabre photocalls (ruling alone on a bench with an intimidating glower, or playing shot-to-death up against a wall). Despite the gangster trimmings, Vex is also an artistic loner, playing with anyone but following no-one, and vocally eschewing scenes.
Strange then, that ‘Eulogy’ should so precisely capture the dank anti-achievement atmosphere of a single scene; English post-punk from the dying days of the 1970s. It’s all there – the rat-scuttle drum-machine sounds and tin-tube vocals; the primitive synth-blipping (from early Mute singles); the street-sweeping snarl-up of half-buried guitar. Even the jittery sheathes of reverb and echo, recalling Hannett’s work with the Invisible Girls and John Cooper Clarke.
Distant and detached, Vex’s voice funnels into the mix as if it’s been blown in with the leaves. The baleful alienation feels like Public Image Ltd. – on Eulogy itself, Vex even declares “I don’t wanna be seen, and isolate myself with your scene… I don’t want it” in a gruff Jah Wobble growl. But Vex simultaneously goes both further and not so far, archly clipping his thoughts and lyrics down to a bare, bored minimum. On Perfect Congestion he just chants “I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear it.” Even the drumbox blip and cheap synth tang of Secret Weapon (with its hopeful refrain of “You’ll stand, you’ll see”, halfway to a classic cyber-single) sounds like a marching call bleached down nearly to nothing; like five-year-old graffiti traces.
It’s a freebie EP, so perhaps it’s best not to expect the cream. Yet this is bland coming from someone who recently made his name with postcard singles and fired up his restlessness with I’m Creative. OK, the sounds were similar, but this time Vex succumbs to a drizzling disaffection. In Tunnel Vision, Vex toys with a tale of inspiration (“it was late afternoon when I felt the brilliance, and it was truly original,”) but delivers it in a robotic monotone, ending up in a blind-alley moan over a slew of guitar fuzz. For Space Out , he flaunts his Cure fandom in a shambles of punk psychedelia and stair-tumbling drum loops, intoning “I can barely breathe, I need to clear my head, I need to get inspired” in a Peter Sellers joke voice.
I suspect that he’s taking the piss on a grand scale (why call anything ‘Eulogy’ when you sound so fucking bored with it all?) but the joke’s a pretty thin one. There’s something in the tone of this which suggests a smart guy deliberately turning his back. While this leaves a disappointing taste, it’s not quite enough to justify me returning the favour and turning my own: Vex has more in him, but it’s time to start taking some risks.
Vex Ruffin: ‘Eulogy’ EP
Stone’s Throw Recordings (no cat. number)
Free download EP
Released: 9th March 2012
Get it from:
free download from Stone’s Throw Recordings.
Vex Ruffin online:
Misfit City 
I get more of an early-80s than a 70s vibe off this, but that might be more for the chosen video clips than for the music itself. Or it might just be me . . .
No – I reckon it’s more that the post-punk sound of the late ’70s bled into the early ’80s. Vex Ruffin’s music reminds me, to a degree, of what John Cooper Clarke was recording with Martin Hannett at the turn of the decade – so it could sit either side of 1980, really.