Music is all about the experience it gives you, and regardless of how many rules about clichés I’m breaking, 2:54 is a band that can take you places in your mind. Their sound is this spacious, echoed, hauntingly beautiful tone that is tough to classify.
Their newest single “Creeping” starts off specifically with noise. There is a thin line between “music” and “noise,” but they blend the two perfectly — which is a hard task, because they use something that is inherently ugly to accent more beautiful things, like the singer’s lovely female voice, and the balance they choose seems to be working well.
Other tracks from their upcoming releases approach the listener differently. “The March” caters to a more industrial ear, a constantly thumping low-end and heavily-distorted guitar flow back to older heavy British roots. But just like the co-existence in “Creeping,” “The March” juxtaposes the heavy with light vocals and guitar tones that fans of The Cure will undoubtedly remember.
You can hear the music that influenced 2:54 quite clearly, as it spans the history of English rock, or at least everything post-Rolling Stones, because there’s no blues in here. Take the industrial sounds Black Sabbath gave us from Birmingham, throw in the echoes and depression The Cure brought from West Sussex and the shoegaze tones that Spiritualized helped create from Warwickshire, and you’ve got 2:54. I usually rag on people whose influences don’t vary but 2:54 seemed to have found the crux of British sounds and refined it into their own.
Like the Welsh having so many words for sheep, the British — this band included — have even more sounds for “rainy day.”