The World's A Strange Place From A Distance

[hmmm_tea]

So, the next CD on the pile is one that seems to have taken up near permenant residence in my CD player (as is the one after it in fact, but that's for another post). cyberinsekt shared one of the tracks off And So I Watch You From Afar's self-titled debut album a few months back, which once listened to necessitated buying the album.

The album is was worth getting just for the cover art, which is an amazingly surreal landscape, featuring a bull with a teapot, a fish with legs and a hammer-headed dog amongst other strange things. This carries on into the track titles, which have names like Eat The City, Eat It Whole and it's somehow quite fitting for the music within.

Bands without vocals seem to have a bit more room to play with their sound and ASIWYFA (to use an acronym as the names far too long to keep typing out) certainly do this, bringing together intricate melodic maths-rock, dramatic arena rock, aggressive heavy metal, discordant punk and grunge all at once, with other influences from all over the place.

The album's opener, Set Guitars To Kill, launches off with an attack of drums followed by grungy guitar before dissolving into the melody and back again. This then moves aside for A Little Bit Of Solidarity Goes A Long Way, which as I mentioned in a previous post, sounds strangely as if it should break into bongos at any second, but instead breaks into heavy metal guitars. And so it continues, each track bringing something new and entirely different from the last. The album's crammed with invention, it's anything but formulaic and there isn't a single weak track.

All the tracks are available on last.fm, but the real highlights of the album, must be Don't Waste Time Doing Things You Hate and The Voiceless.