“Togetherness over separation.”
Bouncy! Fun! Happy! It’s not often that you can use the same adjectives to describe a math rock band and a child’s birthday party. But when the band in question is Northern Ireland quartet And So I Watch You From Afar, it’s very hard not to.
And So I Watch You From Afar made a (very long) name for themselves when they burst on the math rock scene in the 00s. Their music has all the hallmarks of math rock: the outstanding musicianship, the intricate compositions, the wide dynamic range, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them flourishes. But their music has a raucous, joyful, ever-so-slightly mischievous quality to it. It’s hard to listen to their music without smiling.
They are also a band who are happy to challenge themselves and push the boat out a bit. They don’t undergo Ulver-like reinventions from one album to the next, but listening to a new And So I Watch You From Afar album is like visiting an old friend’s house and looking around to see what’s changed. Their previous album, Jettison, was an intentionally subdued affair, a far cry from the highly moshable All Hail Bright Futures. It’s an archetypal example of a band that successfully tried something different without losing their core identity.
This new album, Megafauna, feels like a band coming out of hibernation. And So I Watch You From Afar have taken what they learned from Jettison and paired it alongside some of their earlier bombast. Having said that, this album is certainly lively, but with the exception of “Button Days” and parts of “Gallery of Honour”, there is very little of the unbridled wildness that characterised much of the band’s earlier work.
Most of the tracks feature the busy compositions, mile-a-minute details and fluttering guitar effects that fans will have come to expect. What feels freshest to me are some new experiments in repetition. “Do Mór” perhaps feels rhythmically more rigid than we’re used to from And So I Watch You From Afar while still remaining engaging and compelling. The absolute highlight from this album is the two-part “Mother Belfast”. Part one sounds exactly like what you would expect And So I Watch You From Afar’s tribute to their home to sound like, but the second part is a real surprise. It swings the listener around a rock solid, repetitive beat in ever-more delightful, jaw-dropping ways.
Some tracks do feel like they missed their mark. The album opens with the six-minute “North Coast Megafauna”: the first half is standard And So I Watch You From Afar fare, but the second half feels like a rather clunky experiment in repetition that feels underdeveloped. “Any Joy” is perhaps a little too reliant on a few math rock tropes.
But overall, this album is a delight. And So I Watch You From Afar have proved that they can change direction from one album to the next while maintaining their integrity. The hyper-energetic zaniness of earlier And So I Watch You From Afar releases seems to be a thing of the past, but the band has proved it’s still got plenty of tricks in the bag.
7/10
Megafauna is out August 9th via Pelagic Records, and can be pre-ordered here.