Live Review: 65daysofstatic, Tangled Thoughts Of Leaving, Solkyri, The Red Paintings

It speaks to The Red Paintings tightly controlled image that even in stripped-back, two-piece guitar and violin format, the band retains the ‘painting a human’ stage affectation.

Even acoustic, band is as divisive as ever, yet their sound actually manages to be more effective like this, without the electric accoutrements. The same cannot be said for Sydney’s Solkyri, whose measured use of electronic manipulation make them a wonderful local voice in instrumental rock. The band eschews the well established notions of instrument guitar rock, with crescendos and big moments kept to a minimum, in favour of lush, pedal-affected and texture-driven melodies. The group’s second full-length, scheduled for April, can’t drop soon enough.

Tangled Thoughts Of Leaving provided the most explicitly math-rock-influenced set of the night. The monstrously heavy band plays with rhythm and drone aesthetics behind wall-of-noise guitar crunch. Over the course of the set, the sound did ring a little too uniformly throughout – yet there’s no denying the power of the band when they find their groove.

Performing as a five-piece, 65daysofstatic immediately showcased what they’re all about. The group’s increasingly confident evolution away from guitar rock is never more evident than the epic keyboard drone opener of Heat Death Infinity Splitter. It was from that song’s album, 2013’s Wild Light, that most of the night was drawn from, with a handful of older classics, pulled from the now ten-year-old classic debut The Fall Of Math, breaking up the electronic pulses and drones. In what plays out like a gamble against themselves, 65dos regularly play against live loops and samples of pre-recorded material, daring themselves to stay in the complex time signatures and stick to the rhythms they prepared. It’s exactly this kind of audaciousness that elevate the band above their peers into the upper echelons of what instrumental rock is capable of.