Wild Light Decade #06: Wow, Guitars! [Train Edit] (Patreon)

Another rough rehearsal room band recording for you this week. And perhaps a little bit of a detour from the Wild Light sound that has been slowly beginning to emerge elsewhere?

There’s no data/memories to figure out exactly when in the sessions this one showed up, but the ‘wow, guitars!’ in the title hints at the fact that it had been a while since we’d tried some good old-fashioned RIFFS. 

So break out the wallet-chains, friends! It’s time to remember that back in the very beginning, 65 really just wanted to be The Deftones with extra glitches and spent most of their time hanging out in Corporation, Sheffield’s premier rock club. No effortlessly stylish lounging around the Designer's Republic-branded drum’n’bass nights with the zeitgeist kids for us. Nope. Desperate, earnest dancing to Rage Against the Machine and At the Drive-in all the way.

This demo is not recorded particularly well: these guitars sound more like tired wasps than the hypersonic-chisels-sculpting-a-kind-of-violent-beauty-from-raw-noise that you would normally associate with a band as professional and competent as us.

Nevertheless, it’s some PRETTY SICK RIFFS, BRAH. They would have fit in nicely on any of the preceding albums. What do you think: echoes of the Aren’t We All Running and Await Rescue approaches to guitar work, right? Which can usually be boiled down to Paul mostly does power chords with some weird extra notes in and Joe does the complicated stuff. But tighten up all the angles, get the rhythm section on punctuation duty, and you’ve got a potentially useful sound mesh to play with.

You know, in other contexts, Rob and Si could easily take on Converge in terms of being the kind of rhythm section that can create those kind of angular exoskeletons of utility and bludgeoning syncopation that both enclose and somehow also amplify and articulate the relative softness of guitar distortion. They didn’t really have many opportunities to do this kind of thing during Wild Light, but you can hear hints at it here, even though the shoddy room microphone that captured it.

The second half of the riffs in particular, when the bass line starts moving, is very satisfying.

No real memories of why this got dropped or left behind but suspect it must have been because the overall idea of Wild Light was starting to reveal itself and it simply didn’t sound like this particular song had a role to play.

Not sure why this required the ‘train edit’ suffix as there are no other surviving edits that we know of. The train in question though will no doubt be the Hope Valley line between Manchester and Sheffield, a recurring character in the story of 65-writing-music. Nothing beats a 50 minute commute on a quiet train as a productivity tool. (This is the least rock’n’roll sentence ever written by any band ever).

Here’s a photo of Si, probably wishing he was in Converge. Also a lesser-seen angle of the old 65HQ. The labels on the chest of drawers boil down the essence of 65HQ to perfection: performative aspiration to be found everywhere, but look inside and you’ll see nothing but tasty chaos.

That’s your lot, see you next week friends!

65.x