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.