At the start of last year, 65daysofstatic did a live re-scoring of 1972 film Silent Running in Glasgow, the start of all beautiful stories. The success of those two performances spawned several more around Europe, and subsequently the band set up a project on funding website Indiegogo to gauge whether they could get enough backing from fans to make a recorded version doable. By the end of said project, they'd gotten almost four times the amount of money they were looking for. Proof, if it were needed, that people can be awesome. One of the funding levels (at $25) was for a vinyl version of the album, complete with some postcards of artwork that came from the project and a download of the album. Yeah, I was all over that.
Amazing cover. Really appropriate for the album as well. I can't talk this up enough, but any words I use will be less effective than you just looking at it. Magic, right?
Big piece of black plastic, with some nice labels to match the artwork. Always a plus in my book.
So the Indiegogo project said the first 250 orders of the vinyl version would be numbered, and what do you know we have a number here. I can't tell if it's 103 or 203 but eh, it's inexplicably nice to have one of the numbered ones.
And these are the postcards. They look quite nice, but I will obviously never send them. The fun of being a collector.
The album itself is quite an interesting one. Although you can definitely tell it's the work of 65, it also feels like a film soundtrack. Slightly more grandiose than their usual offerings, it's really well-made and works excellently as an album but I'm not sure what happens to the songs now. Will they become part of the band's live set, or is this going to effectively be treated as separate from the other 65 albums? Personally, I think the latter makes more sense and probably is the more likely outcome. As a little deviation from their regular path though, this was definitely a worthwhile exercise. I've only one slight fault of this set, which is that much of the incidental music the band created for the film was not included, and as such you can't watch the film with the 65 soundtrack over the top as they did in the live performances (although it's worth noting there is a bonus EP of songs available only as a download, which are pretty good too). This I feel is a missed opportunity but it shouldn't detract too much from what is a good album, and moreover a very well put-together little package.
