And So I Watch You From Afar

Post-rock is one of my vices.

I yearn for air guitar solos and air drum solos while I myself am solo. I play riffs in my head during my daily mundane tasks. I imagine myself a long-haired gentleman and toss the head to and fro and fro and to and neck pain be damned, I love it.

There is nothing like finding a band you adore musically and making it a part of your daily soundtrack.

And So I Watch You From Afar have been on Tim and I's "always" list for years but their latest, which has been out for a while now, has gone undiscussed in our daily gab sessions. While we tend to share pretty much anything (like our disdain for sewage baths and Ted Dibiase), we've both been pretty hush about our adoration of And So I Watch You From Afar's latest album, Gangs.

It's privately one of the most exhausting things I've listened to over five dozen times in the past few months. The guitar work is some of the most intensely physical and laborious riffage I've ever heard, from the dainty to the murderous, to the hammer-ons to the hammer-offs. There is nothing like dueling guitars harmonizing at light speed, and there is nothing like fucking feeling the drummer riff as fast and hard as his two guitarists up front.

And So I Watch You From Afar take a genre that is sometimes drooping way too far into the boring category and beat the ever loving fucking shit out of it. Songs like Search:Party:Animal, Lifeproof, and Gang (starting never stopping), run the gamut of emotions from the teeth gnawing guitar work, to the larger than life drums, to the swoops and swells of these cinematic waves and crescendos... everything is over the top gorgeous.

Every song is arms outstretched on a cliff while waves crash below. Every beginning and end marks a different path to Fuck yes. Every song is something I could die to.

The track titled 7 Billion People all Alive at Once caught me by the balls more than once, imagining every person with any semblance of a taste in music raising their voices and hands into the air wherever they are for no other reason than to join in on the "bah bah" sing along. And then towards the end when the crisp riff turns to blood boiling pick gnawing, I seriously want to rip off my office door, break it in half and fashion spears out of the muthafucker.

From tears to spears in mere minutes.

And So I Watch You From Afar murder the fucking shit out of this fucking shit and it's apparent they have no where to go but into the ears of every fucking prick out there who hasn't given these guys a peek.

If you haven't purchased this, do so.