Post-rock often conjures up images of scruffy college-age musicians performing instrumental rock music for college-age fans, heads bowed, bobbing to slow-starting grooves that build into epic jams laden with electric guitar effects and crashing cymbals that later dissolve into quiet, ambient sounds.
It’s tempting to use this description for 65daysofstatic, the British band that’s headlining the Megaport Music Festival in Kaohsiung on Sunday and plays at The Wall (這牆) in Taipei on Tuesday.
But 28-year-old guitarist Joe Shrewsbury, who says his band has never called its music “post-rock,” isn’t crazy about the term.
Photo courtesy of The Wall
“Post-rock has a real stigma to it these days,” he wrote in an e-mail interview with the Taipei Times. The genre, Shrewsbury says, “seems to have murkier connotations with dark rooms and riffs, and artwork with allusions to the fall of the Roman Empire or whatnot.”
“It doesn’t summon images of incredibly healthy and well kempt young men, lithely playing gripping and phenomenally exciting instrumental music that can be danced to until you can’t stand up,” he added.
Indeed, the four-piece band’s music tends to go at a faster pace than most of what’s called “post-punk,” driven by programmed drumbeats and loops.
“A lot of the songs we write do stem from the electronic side of things,” he said. “Because electronics can be so different, and [have such a signature sound], they often dictate the overall feel of a track.”
The band, from Sheffield, broke out in 2004 with The Fall of Math, an album that combined progressive rock with electronica. The tight arrangements and complex rhythm patterns used by the group have also led fans to refer to its music as “math rock.”
65daysofstatic enjoys an avid following in the UK and gained wider exposure as the supporting act for The Cure’s tour of the US in 2008.
The association led to a later collaboration with The Cure’s bandleader, Robert Smith, on Come to Me, a track from 65daysofstatic’s 2010 release We Were Exploding Anyway.
The album is more accessible than the average post-rock album, and Shrewsbury acknowledges that it has a “dancier feel” than the band’s previous recordings. A song like Go Complex could be played at a rave; others such as Dance Dance Dance could be the soundtrack for a video game.
Part of the band’s sense of pop comes from an appreciation of mainstream artists. 65daysofstatic members have remixed and created mash-ups using the music of megastars such as Avril Lavigne, Katy Perry and Justin Timberlake.
“We are always interested in making our music as catchy and accessible and enjoyable as possible,” Shrewsbury said. “So in that sense, ‘pop’ is a huge influence.”
Tiger Girl, a 10-minute track from We Were Exploding, is an example of the band’s balance of post-rock and electro-pop. The song’s melody follows a cinematic arc that ought to be familiar to post-rock listeners, while a thumping techno beat speaks to the dance floor crowd.
Shrewsbury says the songs’ complex arrangements and electronic instruments present a few technical challenges in performing live, but that doesn’t deter the band’s enthusiasm for touring.
“We put everything into playing live, and we love doing it,” he said. “I guess it stays fresh because it’s one of the greatest jobs in the world.”
June 23 to June 29 After capturing the walled city of Hsinchu on June 22, 1895, the Japanese hoped to quickly push south and seize control of Taiwan’s entire west coast — but their advance was stalled for more than a month. Not only did local Hakka fighters continue to cause them headaches, resistance forces even attempted to retake the city three times. “We had planned to occupy Anping (Tainan) and Takao (Kaohsiung) as soon as possible, but ever since we took Hsinchu, nearby bandits proclaiming to be ‘righteous people’ (義民) have been destroying train tracks and electrical cables, and gathering in villages
Swooping low over the banks of a Nile River tributary, an aid flight run by retired American military officers released a stream of food-stuffed sacks over a town emptied by fighting in South Sudan, a country wracked by conflict. Last week’s air drop was the latest in a controversial development — private contracting firms led by former US intelligence officers and military veterans delivering aid to some of the world’s deadliest conflict zones, in operations organized with governments that are combatants in the conflicts. The moves are roiling the global aid community, which warns of a more militarized, politicized and profit-seeking trend
The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s F1, a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor. Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in Top Gun: Maverick, has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on Maverick, takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping
No more elephant and monkey acts. No more death-defying motorbike stunts. No more singing or acting on stage. Several hundred spectators still clapped constantly when acrobats with Dongchoon Circus Troupe, South Korea’s last and 100-year-old circus, twirled on a long suspended fabric, juggled clubs on a large, rotating wheel and rode a unicycle on a tightrope under the big top. “As I recall the hardship that I’ve gone through, I think I’ve done something significant,” Park Sae-hwan, the head of the circus, said in a recent interview. “But I also feel heavy responsibility because if Dongchoon stops, our country’s circus, one genre
RSS