The Load-In In the gig calendar, summertime means one thing: Festivals. Those of you who are paying attention may have noticed that there was no Disco Loadout last month, for various non-disclosable reasons. Subsequently, my ability to attend many shows in July has also been rather limited as well. But…
How many times did I check that I spelled the track name correctly? Many times. How much was this induced by the video that we’re premiering here? A lot. When Nick stumbled uponAiming for Enrike all those years ago, I still didn’t know what I was into. To be honest,…
Blackened sludge quartet Conjurer are hitting the road, so we thought it would be a perfect time to ask them about what makes them tick. It’s not often you get to hear this kind of plodding doom with the kind of songcraft the quartet performs. It’s not just big and…
As I mentioned in my 2018 round-up article last month, one of the most pleasing surprises I had adventuring through London’s live music scene last year was a chance encounter with Brighton quintet The Guts. I found them supporting The Hirsch Effekt at a show in Camden in the immediate…
Four years ago, I started to keep a complete list of every band I saw. Three years ago, I began kicking myself for not starting that childishly simple task sooner. Never mind. At least I can tell you exactly what I got up to this year – with one important caveat. A…
Even a cursory glance of our biweekly playlist updates will reveal that there is a great deal of variety among our staff’s musical tastes. Due to this, we brainstormed the idea of Playlist Swap, where two of our contributors pick their favorite track from each of the nine albums in their grid…
The year is 1258. After besieging the city, the Mongol army breaks its way into Baghdad and begins to lay waste to it. Various libraries and seats of accumulated knowledge are targeted including, according to some reports, the House of Wisdom. So many ancient texts were supposedly dumped into the…
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. 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.
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.
