Waterfall

Where the preceding track pushes forward in a straight line, this one cascades — the title is earned. The guitar figures have a tumbling, overlapping quality, phrases washing into each other with an almost aquatic looseness before the song snaps back into its rhythmic anchor. Ex Hex are working in a classic rock idiom here but the production has a brightness to it, a certain clean shimmer that keeps things from feeling retro or nostalgic in any heavy-handed way. The dynamics are more dramatic than some of their punchier material: there are moments of relative openness, spaces where the arrangement breathes, before the guitars swell back and the song picks up its momentum again. Emotionally it sits somewhere between longing and exhilaration, the kind of feeling that comes from being swept up in something you can't quite name. Timony's vocal delivery is slightly more extended here, working with the melodic contours of the song rather than cutting against them, and the harmonies that appear give the whole thing a warmth that the band's sharper tracks sometimes forgo. It belongs to a tradition of songs that find grandeur in the simple pleasures — the sound of guitars in a room, a chorus that lifts without straining. Someone would reach for this at the end of an afternoon when the light is going golden, when you want something that feels large without being heavy, cathartic without being sad.