The Fall of Math – 65daysofstatic
Several years old in the real world but totally new to me is The Fall of Math, the debut album from the post-rock instrumental group 65daysofstatic. I reviewed their most recent record last year, but somehow never managed to pick up their first one, perhaps because it’s never had an official US release.
Well, that’s about to change. A copy came in the mail for me recently to celebrate the upcoming North Americana release and to set the stage for a huge upcoming tour.
I wanted to write about this record for two reasons. First, because it’s great and I’ve been listening to it a lot. Second, it creates an opportunity to make a meta-comment on the way we approach music.
I love writing a blog for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is that it encourages me to constantly be seeking out new music – something which is clearly good but hard to force yourself to keep up with without some external motivation. However, there are times when I wonder if the whole culture of music blogs creates an unfortunate obsession with recency.
Everyone wants to be cutting edge and only talk about the newest records, to be ahead of the parade of hype, to think about everything in the context of whether it has any chance of making your end-of-the-year list. And all of that is more than a little silly. There is so much good music out there that there is literally no chance that I’ve heard all the good music from any past year, and I think it’s useful now and then to stop, take a breath, and let the music take you over instead of the other way around.
There’s also an interesting phenomenon of constantly being introduced to bands with a back catalog of many years. It’s kind of disarming in terms of trying to write a review. The usual fallback is to compare the new record with the artist’s past work. What have they changed, what remains the same, what does this tell us about the progression of their sound and approach to music? But now, none of that makes sense anymore. You’re left in the curious position of knowing the ending while reading the opening chapter.
All of that is a long way round for me to say that it’s difficult for me to conceptualize The Fall of Math. It’s clearly the same band I was introduced to last year on The Destruction Of Small Ideas, but in some sense this record stands outside of time. It’s the sound of half-thought ideas that flit away before you even know what they are, of a dark shape flickering in and out of your peripheral vision.
But it’s also forceful, aggressive. It crackles like parched pine needles in a campfire – a quick burst of heat and light, gone before you know it.
And then, without warning, it’s gone. The moment when a flock of birds disintegrates…the formation breaks and out of one, many – each moving alone now. There’s something magical about the chaos of it all. There is a logic, a mathematical precision that underlies it all, but it so transcends our simple capacity for prediction that we are left with nothing to do but wonder.
65daysofstatic are on tour with The Cure. Check out their page for all the dates.