ASIWYFA: All Hail Bright Future

The difficulty with post rock is that even indisputable masters of the genre have always seemed to end up chewing their own tail. We know where post rock is coming from – the fast fading shores of indie, metal and punk – but where, exactly, is it headed?

A case in point are Belfast’s And So I Watch You From Afar. Though they attracted a maniacal live following almost from the beginning, for many, ASIWYFA were easier to admire than enjoy. For sure, the five-piece have carved out a unique niche in the red zone between post rock and very loud indie, with songs that lurch and explode all over the place, giddy on their own excessiveness. But the music’s strength – its balls-in-your-face relentlessness – was also arguably a fundamental flaw. With repeated exposure it started to feel like you were listening to the same three or four ideas recycled in different variations (loud bit…. becomes quiet… then LOUD!). Indeed, by the time their second LP, Gangs, was nominated for the Choice Music Prize, a consensus of sorts had formed: ASIWYFA were a ‘fantastic live band’ – shorthand for saying that, though they could kick up a major ruckus in the flesh, their recorded output was decidedly less thrilling. Of course, it’s in the live realm that bands, especially Irish ones, thrive or die nowadays and the fact that their LPs didn’t really approach the zonked bonkerdom of their concert experience was, to many ears, irrelevant. ASIWYFA gave hipsters an excuse to mosh metal-style without actually having to expose themselves to heavy rock or its culture. And that, you might have concluded, was a decidedly good thing.
Still, it was potentially a cul-de-sac of sorts. Thus, it is no shock that, with LP number three, the group have gone in search of a game-changer. The surprise is that they have found it, in such a remarkable and occasionally glorious fashion.
In a project crammed with curve-balls, the weirdest one is the mood of feverish lightheartedness. All Hail Bright Future starts with a pinging keyboard, somewhere between Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer Love’ and an OCD céilí beat, into which are woven semi-audible samples, before a group chant chorus charges over the hill. By the end, the song has an almost ambient sensibility, its fade-out delightfully chilled and exquisite. ASIWYFA return to more familiar ground with ‘Big Thinks Do Remarkable’, which kicks off with a zinging guitar line, segues into a playful mid-section – lots of jittery bass and ‘woo woo’ vocals – and then, remarkably, proposes an eardrum-worrying mash-up of trad music and prog by way of finale.
The aural ambushes keep coming. From its Metallica-esque start, ‘Like A Mouse’ turns death metal, before sing-song vocals – the lyrics an indistinct ‘la la la’ – swoop in; ‘The Stay Golden’, meanwhile, features cow-bell, whirring electronic tempos and a dance-floor beat that slaps you playfully about the midriff. It’s music for grooving to, and definitively not a mosher’s soundtrack.
If the LP has a centerpiece it’s the seven minute-plus ‘Young Brave Minds’, a piledriver that builds from a tingling drone to shrieking art-rock guitars: avalanches of feedback spew everywhere and the band start chanting ‘We Know, We Know’ (what do they know? They’re not telling). It’s somewhere between Arcade Fire’s ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ and seals as remarkable an act of reinvention as you’ll hear from an Irish group this year.