Blog On The Motorway

And So I Watch You From Afar + Lost From Atlas + A Genuine Freakshow, Fibbers, York, 28/09/09

It was a veritable delight to see that the band that I saw supporting Clutch a few months back were playing a venue less than ten minutes walk from my house. York has far too few metal gigs these days, and so the prospect of an evening of riff fuelled mayhem was too good to pass up.

Walking into Fibbers though, one would have been forgiven for thinking you’d walked into the wrong gig. The crowd was made up almost exclusively of friends and family of the two support acts, and the sight of their hipster indie crowds didn’t really inspire much confidence.  First up were A Genuine Freakshow, a band who try just as hard as their name suggests. Imagining themselves as being somewhere between Sigur Ros’ later material and Sigur Ros’ early material it was all nice enough, but they lack the depth of their counterpart’s songwriting, layering quite tedious melancholy indie with trumpets and violin. There was potential there, but they are a long way from realising it.

Next up were Lost From Atlas, an instrumental three piece with designs on a spartan Foals/Minus the Bear math rock sound.  Musically they are competent enough, although the guitarist’s tapping became a little repetitive at times.  At certain points there were people in the crowd singing in unison over the top of it, and I suspect that they have only recently made the switch to instrumental music.  But there is bags of potential here, every one of the songs drawing your attention. They need to introduce a bit more variety into their sound, but given time they could be a very good band. As it stands they are merely a good local band.

Next up are the headliners. They may have the worst name to have ever been spewed out of an emo-band-name-generator but this Belfast four piece hit the stage with such a ferocity that the gulf between headliners and support band is established about thirty seconds into their first song.  Supporting Clutch they had been notable and interesting, but given a stage of their own they are absolutely stunning.

Musically a mix of hard riffing and crystelline  math rock, the kinetic energy of each and every member means that you can’t help but be drawn in by the sheer bludgeoning power of this band. Every song throws something different into the mix, and takes the established concepts of quiet-loud and discards them, so that the changes seem so organic and natural that you wonder how nobody has ever written them before.

From start to finish they are plagued with technical problems, but somehow this never interrupts the flow of the set.  Speaking from the solitary microphone at the side of the stage, the guitarist who spends most of the gig bleeding profusely from a cut he sustains early on keeps the crowd entertained with the sort of banter you’d expect from a band from Belfast. 

Actually the technical problems actually give each of the songs breathing room, allowing each of them to fully sink in before they are off and running again, hurling themselves around the stage without ever missing a beat.  The variety in the songs keep them from becoming stale or repetitious, but the bludgeoning nature of the riffs, calling to mind Karma To Burn, means at no moment do I find myself glancing at my watch or even looking at the crowd reaction.

At the end of the gig, my friend Will turns to me and says; ‘Ever get the impression you’ve seen something a bit special?’ a slightly maniacal grin plastered over his face.  And So I Watch You From Afar then, terrible name, but a bit bloody special.