Jettison

And So I Watch You From Afar

And So I Watch You From Afar are back with this ambitious offering. Jettison is a multimedia project that was created in collaboration with visual artist Sam Wiehl. The band's contribution is a 38-minute long, seamless journey that ebbs and flows between wonder, fury, and melancholy. In many ways, I think it shares a lot of similarities in tone to one of my favourite records of theirs, All Hail Bright Futures, albeit much less bombastic overall. What this record does have though is some wonderfully arranged and recorded string sections, a clear step up from any other time these types of sounds have been included on previous records.

This piece puts its best foot forward with a section titled The Dive. The introduction has these lovely, full guitar chords and a great bed of strings as we get some spoken word over top. When the song transitions into the following section with more full band instrumentation, the drums, guitars, and bass are very dry, giving this really intimate feeling. As those elements surround me, on the periphery, strings and distant backing vocals swell to reveal a bigger world. This section becomes more layered with each passing moment, as a curiously played guitar arpeggio cascades away along with more twinkly clean guitar leads. All of it just washes over you creating this healing, meditative space. The space towards the end of this section dissipates just a little and we have a slight change to the drum beat. I usually don't get this excited about drum sounds but the toms in this section are amazing; lovely round sound, balanced perfectly in the mix where the initial impact is felt and lingers for just the right amount of time before it decays.

The following section, titled Lung, is where you get to see some of that classic ASIWYFA sound come through. It begins with these syncopated guitar strums, giving the song a great deal of groove and swagger. You will also hear those pitch shifting effects and delay stutters that I'm a total sucker for. Afterwards, we get this super angular and disjointed guitar line which again is very indicative of the band's style. Once again, I also love the use of space on this track. Initially, the instrumentation is very dry and matches up really well with the rigid and staccato nature of the performances. When the guitars transition to lines that are a little more legato, that's when everything becomes lightly soaked in reverb. I thought it was quite creative.

After this, we start to get into more of the post-rock type material on this record. It's not bad, but it does almost become background filler. Once we breach the midway point, things start to ramp up significantly. We get more distorted, wailing guitars, crashing drums, and the tempos start to pick up a little. This is where you would expect ASIWYFA to really come into their own, however, the band makes their biggest stumble in this section. Submerge has quite a lengthy build lasting nearly three and half minutes long. Right at the very end of the build, we get some pretty unflattering drum mixing which is pretty unfounded for this band. But that doesn't come close to what follows this build up; two shockingly bad guitar solos that are amateurish and not at all tuneful. Emerge is thankfully a step to get back on track, but even that section is mostly just frantic guitar strumming. When this section concluded, I was happy to see the band close Jettison out on a more calculated note; coming full circle in its very last moments.

Despite the hiccups, this was still a good offering from And So I Watch You From Afar. I enjoyed a great deal of the sounds, the production in most cases, and also the progression of the entire piece. It was not necessarily what I expected (or even wanted) from the band, but I commend them for trying something totally new as I do think their sound started to stagnate after All Hail Bright Futures. I do miss the more bombastic moments, the riffs, and a general feeling of excitement that I get when listening to this band's best stuff, but I also understand that there are other pieces at play here, specifically the visual component of this project, that may have influenced certain musical decisions that I wouldn't understand without digesting all of the project's components. Regardless, this is still a decent release that would make any fan of cinematic rock happy.