By Keith Walsh
When it comes to punk and post punk songs, there’s a tradition of putting tons of raw emotion into the vocal performance. With their tune “Thracian,” the supergroup Stat·ic lets Julian Shah-Tayler take center stage with lyrics and a vocal melody that convey pure anger.

Shah-Tayler explains: “The focal point, the focus of the song is my lyric, the focus of the song is the melody. We access a lot of the subconscious for this whole project. What you’re hearing is a first take vocal, on initially hearing the song.” In a tune that bears repeated listening, the vocals are immediately catchy:

“We won’t take, we won’t take this/We won’t take how fake this world is/We won’t take,we won’t take this/We won’t take how fake this life is.”
(From ‘Thracian’ by Stat·ic)

“Numerologically Appropriate”
Stat·ic features bass and synths by Darwin Meiners, guitar by Dustin Heald, and graphic art by Mark Gleason, with Shah-Tayler stepping out of his usual role of creating production-intensive synth rock to create something refreshingly aggressive. For another look at this project, please visit synthbeat.com

Referring to the difference between his Singularity project and his work producing Darwin, himself and others, Shah-Tayler said a different approach is taken. Stat·ic is completely at odds with the way these players customarily operate. “We’re maximalists at heart. Everything we do is just full of noise, we fill up – there’s barely time to breathe. I (usually) veer towards big pads, Cure-style sounds, and we felt very much that we wanted this to be spiky, and angular and angry and as I say, we’ve been referencing a bit of Aleister Crowley, a bit of numerology. I mean this, as you notice, is being released six months to the day after the first thing we did.” (That ‘first thing’ being Stat·ic’s first single, “S Blonde.”

As for the release date hinting at something sinister, and the contrast between Thracian” and “S Blonde,” Shah-Tayler said “It’s numero-logically appropriate. The first one was very insular, a self-seeking one, a critical one, of peoples’ views of themselves, and people view of other people, and all that sordid stuff. And this one is more about anger at how everything has been taken away from us, and from our surroundings and from our ecosphere. I mean it may not sound like it at all, but it’s partly an eco-protest song, in some ways.”

The energy of “Thracian” is minimalist in the way some post-punk bands were in the early 1980s. “We’re definitely referencing bands like DEVO and Gang Of Four,” said Shah-Tayler, “and bands that have an artistic approach, have a limitations approach on things….And limitations create the artistic aspects of it.”

http://www.darwinmeiners.com/
http://www.dustinheald.com/
https://www.markgleason.org/
https://www.julianshahtayler.com/
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