By Keith Walsh 
There’s a video I’d really like to share right now, but I’m sworn to secrecy. It’s the debut single from California’s new supergroup Static, which features Julian Shah-Tayler, Darwin Meiners, Dustin Heald, and Mark Gleason.

The concept of Static, as Darwin told me,  is to celebrate the limitations and happy accidents caused by the use of technology from the 80s. Visual artist Mark Gleason is a non-musical member, said by Darwin in my interview with him last year, to be the guy you want in your band because visual appeal will be an important component.

Static’s debut video “S Blonde” is stunningly crafted in every way, and was directed and edited by Heald. The tune and video features performances by Shah-Tayler on vocals, who only appears in cutaway shots and projected on a screen behind Darwin and Heald, who are miming with synths, bass and guitar, fully masked for the pandemic.

It’s a chilling song, in the way Bowie’s “Scary Monsters” is, though the sonorities are quite different, falling between punk, early 80s techno pop and darkwave while transforming these genres into something that’s very 2021 . Shah-Tayler gives a convincingly mean performance, with cockney vocal overtones. At the song’s outset, he sings:  “I look in your eyes/but your eyes are dead/I look for something there/there’s nothing in your head.”

Static finds Shah-Tayler — who usually writes and performs his own material with his solo project The Singularity —  focusing his energies on the frontman role while Darwin and Heald do the instrumentation and machine programming. “S Blonde”  features lyrics by Shah-Tayler and was mixed by Darwin.

I’d like to say more, and hopefully will soon. Stay tuned for more info about Static.

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

finis