Music Recommendation: And So I Watch You From Afar: Heirs

An adrenaline rush that wakes you up in a cold sweat at two in the morning.

You wake up on your starship staring at the asteroid fields and pockets of ice crystals floating about you in oblivion.

Your ideas about what constitutes tonal beauty are challenged when you're trying to keep your mouth above the tidal wave of bass and gain which is stifling the ability to breathe and think lucidly.

Voices? Are those real words? Your brain tries to comprehend the vocalizations until you realize that ignoring your preconceptions of language is the only road to comprehension.

Your watering eyes blink and you wipe the salt off your forehead trying to see into the mist. The burning comes from the sadness or maybe the trauma of joy crashing against your stone tower of musical presuppositions.

Is this the future? Or is this the decade on repeat? Holding hands with strangers you know better than the hands you’re hold theirs with.

That’s a bit of the tumult that Heirs offers its listeners. It’s comfortable but it isn’t familiar. It’s your average raucous post/math rock album but it also has dignity. The band is clearly comfortable with displaying their emotions and they are also at home using their mouths to speak musical notes rather than words if that’s what it takes to get the point across. You’ll want to sing along, but there aren’t words. It’s your favorite song that prompts you to mouth the non-sense words, but you’re underwater, fighting to hold your breath.

At once, ASIWYFA channels post-hardcore’s destructive bass tones, Tera-Melos’ atonality (7/4 vocal-earthquake These Secret Kings I Know), Animals As Leaders’ progressive proclivities (People Not Sleeping, second half), and Adebesi Shank’s floor pounding stomp-riff-ic madness (F*cking Lifer). Somehow they trimmed the fat off of their experience with All Hail Bright Futures, which by all means is a great album but had a lot of weird hiccups. Those songs weren’t forgettable but there were some uncomfortable filler songs. And the effort was made a bit worse by the lack of meaning in real words. Heirs is the antithesis: fullness of meaning within the lack of words.

Heirs is less dauntingly weird, and takes some undue challenge out of listening to it by blending the incoherence of math-rock with the atmospheric beauty of post-rock and the space-exploration of progressive rock. It’s the guilty pleasure of accessibility without all the alienation of a sell-out.

Highly recommended.

The vanity within long flights

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after. (Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 ESV)

And thus begins the overwhelming feeling of vanity come 36,000 feet above the earth. I'm listening to music with earbuds to forget the crying baby and young child in the seats behind me. I'm trying to ignore the slight turbulence when it came at the beginning of the flight. I'm sitting in cramped space. The week was too short but the days were too long. Dorena (another no-name post rock band from Europe) is serenading my ears and my nerves.

Megan is doing the crossword puzzle and forgetting that nothing else exists in the space of the three hour flight. My neck is stiff. I wish I had the patience to crossword puzzles. Another small window into her world.

And I want to sleep and take advantage of the two hours I've gained back with the vain time zone adjustments.

Vanity vanity vanity. And only in Christ can I really enjoy it.

Nick.