Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock

by Jack Chuter

This is where 65daysofstatic and Storm Static Sleep part ways. There’s validity in the argument that they never belonged here in the first place, but anyway – such is the tenuous understanding of post-rock that all guitar-based instrumental music was at risk of being swallowed up inside it. 2010’s We Were Exploding Anyway was, as so eloquently put by The Quietus, their “ah, fuck it” album. We’ve seen the post-rock and post-metal tags outstaying their welcome in the latter-day music of Mogwai and Pelican respectively. 65daysofstatic’s new record put the hollowness of post-rock to the test; what if the band transformed into a fully-fledged electronic dance band, more indebted to The Prodigy than Mogwai? Would listeners and journalists inanely apply the label even then? Some did. Other writers painted We Were Exploding Anyway as a deliberate evacuation of the post-rock territory. It seemed somewhat patronising. Were 65daysofstatic really so harrowed by the term that they felt the need to flee into a 51-minute voyage through outer space, or was this the album they would have made regardless? Some of the more intricate aspects of the record risked being overlooked for the sake of pitching it as a post-rock protest. The record wasn’t a total abandonment of their previous music, and the twitches of urgency and confusion that defined The Fall of Math could still be felt during the cluster-bomb climax of pieces like “Go Complex”. The clue was in the album title. Maybe 65daysofstati...