There are a couple of unnecessary deceits to get your head around with And So I Watch You From Afar as a high concept.
The first is the vaguely stalker-ish thing around their name, one which can be taken in a romantic or otherwise context, but either way has overtones of the obsessional. The second is that on this, their fifth album, the Belfast quartet have pretty much dispensed with words, those great enablers of communication and understanding, tools which only the bravest of songwriters are willing to dispense with.
That’s not to say that prose can’t be ultimately a gift of immense trivia bestowed upon any audience, but to have none at all? Our greatest lyricists deliver so much more than just random letters of course, so dispensing with words opens an artist’s work up to interpretation way beyond their control as much as it removes the shackles of convention, twisting the dynamic of what constitutes a song at all.
To summarise, it’s complicated.
In order to take on the job positively, the foursome – guitarists Rory Friers and Niall Kennedy, bassist Johnathan Adger and drummer Chris Wee – worked with a new process, filtering The Endless Shimmering’s 30 maybes into a tightly gathered final roster of nine that, by and large, were completed in a couple of takes played live in a rehearsal room.
Consequential fortune also helped them: decamping from home to the Machines With Magnets studio in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, they immediately found themselves in the middle of a major snowstorm, the net result of which was a shared sense of isolation and purpose; facing a whiteout, there was nothing else to do but play.
Music without words with guitars is generally defined as ‘post rock’ these days, but Endless Shimmering is too bold, too kinetic and not as consciously exclusive as that sideshow’s academic end often suggests. Opener Three Triangles begins at a racing, full blooded tempo, guitar lines traversing deepening fissures and a series of ever more urgent peaks, like a desperate race to keep the listener’s head above rising tides.
This feeling of movement is constant: on Terrors Of Pleasure the riffs are gunned into shapes and tones, a barrage that neatly avoids being overwhelming and remains throughout all of its countless phases a long, circuitous groove, never once looping.
Being dumb works, especially when expression is given to musicians who choose eloquence through their instruments. Friers has claimed that there’s a huge amount of emotion invested in these generally clipped and time economic compositions, but whilst they’re coy on the specifics and obvious direct influences are few – closer Chrysalism seems to have a slug of Barber’s Adagio For Strings etched into it – this is music with which it’s still eminently possible to connect. Sometimes the titles offer nominal help, as A Slow Unfolding Of Wings flips from avalanches of noise to a gently idling counter, like the theme tune to Springwatch reimagined as a mini rock opera.
Given the foursome’s commitment to brevity otherwise, it’s the longest excursions here which somehow make for the most satisfying, both leaps that breathe with a fully realised punch and subtlety. I’ll Share A Life is the upbeat, more virtuous of the two, a story with discernible passages, but the centrepiece here is the seven-minutes-plus of Dying Giants, an odyssey which escapes any notion of math-rock gestalt by soaring into the kind of glorious ambience that takes ASIWYFA‘s kindling and turns it into something capable of illuminating the sky for miles.
Maybe this caterwauling is both a validation of the album’s name and their own; like a mirage it changes shape depending from which perspective it’s listened to, and for some the band’s determination to confront the limitations of their form will be too intense to stand.
The Endless Shimmering is their landmark record despite what it lacks, the embodiment of joyful progression and proof that thrills are what you make from what you have.
