North London’s five-piece geek-core future-rock eclectic car-crash of zeroes, ones and bile, Twentysixfeet, have shown promise on every occasion Crud has witnessed them on a stage. They’ve been a hectic pneumatic-crusher full of progressive rock and computer chips, that’s for sure. There’s been an air of the geeks rising to inherit the earth, a Matrix style conspiracy, which is exciting, empowering, certainly. But for that same reason things felt just too meticulous at points and rather than becoming the sum of their many influences they verged on nu-metal uniformity, angst rock fed through the mainframe like a pencil sketch of a Molotov cocktail sent by fax. But with this debut mini-album they’ve inverted that whole situation brilliantly, innovating endlessly and leaving us thinking there might be just too much going on now.
Eau de Mars Volta with a British nose? To a point, yes. The ambitious 8 minute ‘All Things Fall Apart’ stands as a good a summary as any, precariously hurling together clattering industrial and thrash beats, restless slithers of minimal guitar, hypnotically ambient synthesised sounds, malfunctioning electronics, slabs of distortion and vocals ranging from anguished falsetto to artery-rupturing furious. Towards the climax it sounds like War of the Worlds gone drum ‘n’ bass. How else to describe them? Deftones doing a ratchet job on ‘Kid A’. Thom Yorke facing his demons on the set of Tron against an angry Jeff Buckley. Martin Grech impregnated with an electronic virus. Seriously challenging either way. To use the term ‘nu-metal’ now would be an insult. Can we back-date an apology?