65daysofstatic

Obstacles are only there to be beaten – remember that the next time you’re in a glitch-rock (sorry 65daysofstatic, but we’ve got to call you something) band trapped within unforgiving confines. The sound at The Garage may suit balls-out rockers and snot-nosed punks, but the subtleties lurking inside 65dos’s electronic squall are lost as the surround-sound reverberation threatens to have one’s dinner reappearing all too soon. Still, at least this way you can literally feel the music, and not just in the pit of your belly.

When everything aligns, albeit briefly, the effect is wondrous. The music splashes and slashes your face like shards of ice, transforming every skin cell into the finest porcelain before shattering them into a thousand tiny fragments, each of which bursts into a flare of purest energy, spiralling across your field of vision, pirouetting before a stage housing four skittering silhouettes. You smell burning on the air. It’s the tiny hairs inside your ears. They’ve gone the way your other senses are headed: to a flaming Heaven of bootlegged pop smashes and dangerously volatile beats ‘n’ riffs. The figures lurch slowly, as if on reel-to-reel videotape at start-up, before pummelling the tools of their trade into splintered kindling. The figures know of no genre-specific boundaries to hold them back; we know of no single force in the world that could do likewise.

Of course, when the physical environment conspires to thwart their hold on the senses the effect is pretty far from transcendental – the trademark laptop stutters and hard-drive adrenaline shots sound like crickets drowned by a flood of pneumatic drills. When it’s right, though, it’s so right.

That obstacles remain in their way is natural – you don’t fight your way up from the deepest catacombs of the underground without getting a little dirty – but that so few remain is illustrative of what 65dos have achieved in the last 12 months. Their star is in absolute ascendance, and all anyone else can do now is watch it go nova.