Words: Gareth O’Malley

Some bands just can’t keep still. While there are those who will go into the studio with the sole intention of making an album after whittling the tracklist down to, say, ten tracks, after which they’re finished with the sessions and gear up for touring, others will take every viable idea they’re created and run with them, releasing these tracks as b-sides.

65daysofstatic are one such band. They’ve never skimped on extra material, that’s for sure. Each album they’ve released, save ‘One Time For All Time’, has been supplemented with a plethora of non-album tracks, but it seems that the sessions for ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’ were particularly productive.

In all, an album’s worth of extra material (‘After San Francisco’, ‘Memorydress’ and the six new tracks that make up ‘Heavy Sky’) has surfaced, and since this is a band who set themselves high standards, the majority of the left-over material complements its parent album quite nicely, in that quite a few of these songs are every bit as good as their exceptional fourth record.

The only area in which this EP falls short is in its lack of cohesion. If this were an album, jarring transitions like the one between the atmospheric piano-driven thump of ‘Pacify’ and the mad rush of penultimate track ‘Beats Like A Helix’, which is the closest to ‘The Fall of Math’ territory the group have come in quite a while, would have quite a disjointing effect.

However, as this doesn’t seem to matter much, the EP’s running order can be forgiven its faults - and applauded for highlighting the diversity of the thirty minutes of new material on offer. The ‘Wishful Thinking’ (three-minutes-and-change) edit of the ten-minute ‘Tiger Girl’, whilst not as poorly executed as the pointless single edits of ‘Weak4’ and ‘Come To Me’, doesn’t merit much in the way of discussion, but otherwise it’s all good. Better than that in fact.

‘Sawtooth Rising’ hearkens back to the intensity of ‘Stumble.Stop.Repeat’, while ‘The Wrong Shape”s sparkling melody marks it out as one of the highlights. There’s also what seems to be a cheeky reference to the opening track in ‘Guitar Cascades’ (which is just that: ten minutes of swelling guitars, later joined by what seems to be a staple of this new material - massive drums), as its opening chords mirror those that form the foundations of ‘Tiger Girl’. The unexpected self-referential pattern is soon drowned out by all-encompassing wall of noise, before a new, albeit distant and distorted, melody rolls in. Quite unlike anything the band have recorded before, it is a daunting listen, and its rewards are hidden rather well. Perseverance is the key.

A host of new avenues have been opened up by ‘Heavy Sky’, and we know well that 65daysofstatic are good at reinventing themselves. They’ve already done it three times after all, so who knows what future recordings will sound like. Given their reputation for having high standards, however, it seems that the only thing that won’t change is the output’s quality.

9.0