Good Weather For Airstrikes

Sometimes I really suck. Seriously, I’ve been meaning to post on these guys ever since I named “Retreat! Retreat!” the fifth-best song of 2004, yet here we are - it’s almost October 2006 - and this is pretty much the first you’ve heard of them in this space. People really liked the song from them I posted yesterday (”Radio Protector”), so here’s a full fledged artist (mega) profile of them to respond to the deman for more of their material. 65 Days of Static (often credited as 65daysofstatic) first stormed into my awareness when Lizzy played “Retreat” for me in the Spring of 2005 (incidentally it was the same day I got into UVA if I remember correctly), and the band, who I originally took for a bit of a one-hit wonder, has been steadily earning my utmost respect ever since. I spent the better part of the next year trying to track down a copy of their debut album, The Fall of Math, and after another half-year of looking high and low I finally have their full discography to enjoy, which includes 2005’s stellar follow-up to the aforementioned debut, One Time For All Time. But let’s get back to where it all started.

With some twinkling glockenspiel plinks and the words, “We will not retreat, this band is unstoppable!” (a Matt Dillon sample from 1992’s grunge film Singles), the post-rock juggernauts are off and shredding on “Retreat! Retreat!”, taking you on a 4 minute adventure you won’t soon forget. Seemlessly melding ferocious guitar riffs, drum n’ bass beats, live drums, and computer glitches, 65 Days Of Static created a masterpiece of controlled noise that is equal parts viciously euphoric, mind-blowingly frenetic, and really, really loud. “Retreat” is an excercise in hugeness, peerless in scope and scale and as massive and agressive as anything Mogwai’s ever done, all while retaining a decidedly electronic feel with the presence of computerized glitches and the odd boom and bip. Despite my initial fear that 65 Days might have peaked immediately out of the gate with their debut single, I couldn’t have been more wrong. When I finally tracked it down, the rest of Math proved to yield a handful of other excellent tracks, the best of which were “I Swallowed Hard, Like I Understood”, which sees the band finding the perfect middle ground between glitches and guitars, and “Hole”, which went on to have a seven-song EP bult around it as the band’s follow-up release to the “Retreat” CD-single. The EP featured the title track accompanied by three new songs as well as remixes of two of the debut’s best songs, a self-remix of title track “The Fall of Math” and an interesting Mothboy remix of “Retreat! Retreat!”, the latter of which is available for download below. The highlight of the EP, however, is new track “The Wrong Side of the Tracks”, which alternates frenetic, rapidfire percussion and monstrous, suffocating feedback-drenched bass with what-the-fuck samples and serene atmospherics, the combination of which we’ll have even the most stable person prone to fits of epilepsy by its conclusion.

MP3s:
“Retreat! Retreat!” - 65daysofstatic ((highly recommended))
“I Swallowed Hard, Like I Understood” - 65daysofstatic
“Wrong Side of the Tracks” - 65daysofstatic
“Retreat! Retreat!” (Mothboy Remix) - 65daysofstatic

However, despite the excellence of The Fall of Math and the impressiveness of the Hole EP, it’s the group’s sophomore effort, One Time For All Time, that completely defied and blew away all of my expectations with the significant evolution of the band’s sound. Bookended by career highlights “Drove Through Ghosts To Get Here” and incredibly-epic closer “Radio Protector”, One Time finds the band exploring a far more atmospheric sound, even-darker than the earlier material, that sees the band introducing a dramatic piano to their arsenal as a perfect compliment to the guitars and agressive percussion of the debut. Leaning at times further towards the haunting arrangements of a more electronic Explosions In The Sky or a more aggressive Sigur Ros than Mogwai, the hard-rocking debut album’s closest peer, One Time is a quantum leap from its predecessor. The haunting arrangements on tracks like “23kid” recalls those found on the Icelandic quartet’s 2002 opus (), though Sigur Ros rarely rock as hard as 65 Days do once the slow build on these songs reach their climax. Opener “Drove Through Ghosts To Get Here” opens with a haunting piano progression and percussion punctuated by human grunts and moans (an effect employed to equal success on Justice’s “Waters of Nazareth”, which gradually builds in both pace and intensity to an apocalyptic climax. And while I’d hate to slight everything in between by jumping to the closer, it’s the album’s final track that sets the high-water mark for 65 Days of Static’s career to date. A true epoch in every sense of the word, the song opens with a wistful piano progression that (again) gradually builds before the introduction of a dramatic percussion section takes the song to new heights. Just over two minutes in the instrumentation dies out and yields to a beautiful glockenspiel solo, before the band turns the amps back on and rocks the song to its completion in appropriately epic fashion. Incredible, incredible stuff folks.

MP3s:
“Drove Through Ghosts To Get Here” - 65daysofstatic ((highly recommended))
“Radio Protector” - 65daysofstatic ((HIGHLY recommended))

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 12:29 am and is filed under Artist Profile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.