Post Rock Post – April 2018

Eden Kupermintz
Lists!, Post Rock Post
In a sense, trying to get my meaning across with these opening paragraphs is more akin to post rock than I'd thought. And that's what I'd like to leave you with before we dive into this month's picks: we don't make this list just to showcase our taste or highlight great bands (although the latter is a big part of it, for sure). We also do it because we feel like post rock is an important genre with important things to say, things which relate to the basic human condition, our hopes, dreams, failures and expectations of the world us. So as you go deeper into this post, try asking yourself what emotions, modes of thoughts and perspectives is this mostly instrumental music trying to get across to me? What is being communicated by and underneath the music I am listening to?

And So I Watch You From Afar – The Endless Shimmering

Eden Kupermintz
Reviews
And So I Watch You From Afar. After releasing one of the finest examples of the sub-genre, All Hail Bright Futures, the band erroneously became the only name that people could cite from this movement. This became even more of a shame when they followed up on that excellent release with Heirs, an album that was fine but was definitely no standard-bearer of the approach to math-rock. It now seems, however misguided it may be, that ASIWYFA are back to claim the crown of large math-rock once again. The Endless Shimmering, sporting one of the most dubious cover arts we've yet to lay our poor eyes open, is very much a return to for the Irish band. It reaches back into their earlier roster to bring forth the sounds that made us fall in love with them while still keeping enough from All Hail Bright Futures to satiate our thirst for its particular tone. The Endless Shimmering is, from beginning to end, an album focused on delivery, punch and vibrant math-rock. We mean that by the way; the album doesn't mess around with intros or build ups or elongated passages musing on time and space.

SEIMS – 3

Eden Kupermintz
Reviews
Ah geez, we just spoke about controlled chaos and now we have to go back there again. One of the first genres to explore the power of putting subtle structure on top of flamboyant turmoil was jazz; that's basically it's entire raison d'etre. Since then, many younger genres have turned to it for ideas on how to understand music, an ultimately systematized affair, through a wilder lens. Progressive rock, math rock, post rock, and even thrash and death metal, have all suckled at the teat of one of the modern progenitors of music as we know it when they came to dance with unpredictable fire. To that prodigious chain of students and practitioners of the power inherent in the splicing of jazz, we can now add SEIMS.