Sheffield’s 65daysofstatic have started a new genre, but it seems they’re so far ahead of the game that they’ll just have to keep rockin’ the dancefloors till the rest of the world catches up. Since their stumble.stop.repeat EP in 2003 they’ve been mashing up their influences like an instrumental Pop Will Eat Itself (quite literally, with some fucked-up mashups on half-official EP releases), and one time for all time could well be their release yet.
First things first: this is instrumental music. They’ve got the riffs and the rhythms, but they don’t want the rhymes – and who needs some singer yammering over the top of noise like this? You’ve got jackhammer riffs (more often than not in 6/8 time), cyclical piano lines like it’s 1989, splattercore beats mixed in with live drums, tasty little glitches and judiciously placed samples.
Since that first EP the production values have improved outta sight, and while it could be said that one time for all time just repeats the formula of their first album, if anything it’s even better produced, it looks beautiful, and it’s got a few killer tracks that make it indispensible. For a start, there’s “drove through ghosts to get here”: a vari-speed track that I can love. It’s drum’n’bass-meets-rock, as atmospheric as all get out, and every time the martial beats slow down the tension builds. Then you get “await rescue”, which starts out as almost pure drum’n’bass, with haunting dischords in the synths and a big rock middle section. This is what music ought to be like.
That the rest of the album manages to live up to this beginning is good enough. It would be a brilliant introduction to 65dos, and we can only hope that there’s much more to come.
