There are hordes of road-dogged and battle-tested bands that flourish under the one-night-after-another pressure cooker of intensive touring, yet still struggle to find their comfort zone when the crowds are gone and the tape is rolling.
Belfast indie rockers And So I Watch You From Afar have developed a reputation over the past few years as circuit-hopping veterans, bringing their dizzying, punk-indebted instrumental compositions to dingy basements in Brooklyn, packed festival fields in Belgium, obscure music-deprived burgs in Russia, and sold-out arenas in their Northern Ireland hometown.
What is perhaps more significant than their passport credentials is the way in which they have consistently managed to avoid the aforementioned lightning-out-of-the-bottle letdown. From the laser-beam march that set off their 2009 self-titled debut to the thunderous tribal percussion that closed out 2011’s breakthrough ‘Gangs‘, these guys have approached each recording with the same sort of off-the-rails intensity and clenched-fist grit that they determinedly bring to the stage.
With this year’s ‘All Hail Bright Futures‘, ASIWYFA have continued to build upon this controlled-chaos blueprint by streamlining their usual frenetic idiosyncrasies into a cleaner, more conceptually sound arrangement.
Their previous reference points – the sweeping post-rock of Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, the start-stop mathematics of Battles and Hella, the shattered structure of late-nineties hardcore – are all inevitably here, except this time they are strung together with a new found reliance on melodic pop accessibility, which is no small feat considering this is a group that incorporates less words into an entire album than most others do on a single song.
Not to say that this one completely lacks a vocal element. In fact, it is a relative sing-along compared to the scarcity of syllables sprinkled throughout their earlier efforts. It’s just that language in general is repeatedly used the way a more conventional band might use a middle-eight breakdown, not so much as a central focus but more as bookmarker for something bigger yet to come.
The hypnotic chant of “The sun is in our eyes” appears like a desert mirage amidst the barrage of high-pitched frequencies on ‘Big Thinks Do Remarkable‘, while the shouted spelling-out of the song title on ‘Ambulance‘ just further electrifies the stellar display of power metal guitar interplay that follows. Even the incoherent babble that drives ‘Ka Ba Ta Bo Da Ka‘ is merely a placeholder for a slick repetitive solo that eventually provides the track’s real hook.
What really steers ‘All Hail Bright Futures’ isn’t the expanded vocabulary, as the real shift arrives alongside an infusion of added instrumentation and stylistic variance. This is driven home with the album’s centerpiece, a dynamic three-song suite that features everything from brightened four-on-the-floor techno throbs, to Caribbean cruise steel drums, to cinematic string orchestration and lonely trumpet calls.
Despite this sort of polished experimentation, ASIWYFA still remains at its core a do-it-yourself garage band, one that values the from-the-ground-up attitude that can only come with countless hours of practice space sessions and an endless sea of solitary soundchecks.
While it may be unreasonable to expect that sort of cohesion to carry over completely into a finished product, there is something to be said that when called upon they can continue to conjure up a suitable stand-in.
