Caspian

Long-running cinematic rock band Caspian don’t want you to call their fifth album a “redemption,” a “comeback,” a “rise from the ashes,” or any of the other sentiments that emerge when bands return from nearly five years of silence.
“I’ve grown weary of reading about bands discuss the renewing, rehabilitative properties their most recent [album] has had on them,” says guitarist/keyboardist Philip Jamieson. “They incur corrosion, come close to running out of gas, descend into the dark abyss, and finally emerge on the other side with a record that has given them crystal clear perspective and a confident path forward. On Circles is not that record.”
Instead, this majestic collision of post-rock, metal, shoegaze, electronics, noise, minimalism and ambient music is an existential meditation, an acceptance of the cyclical nature of both life and career. Recorded at Studio 4 in Conshohocken, PA, by producer Will Yip (Code Orange, Defeater, Quicksand, Turnstile), On Circles marks the most organic writing and recording sessions in Caspian’s 15-year history. Together for four weeklong songwriting sessions, the band (joined by propulsive new drummer Justin Forrest), opted for music gleaming with visceral impact instead of over-thought tangles, over-arching concepts and drawn-out crescendos
On Circles is an art-rock record swirling with fourth-world saxophones, dubby textures, 7/8 rhythms and hard-sawed cello from Jo Quail (Myrkyr, Winterfylleth, Poppy Ackroyd). The band stretches out to make room for guitarist Jonny Ashburn’s melodic interplay (“Division Blues”), bassist Jani Zubkovs’ punk shredding (“Collapser”) and the mandolin of founding member Calvin Joss (“Flowers of Light”). Guitarist Erin Burke-Moran wrote a pastoral-to-epic, chamber-rock journey (“Ishmael”) as a tribute to eight months spent on the Appalachian trail. The wistful “Nostalgist” features vocals from Kyle Durfey of fellow Northeastern alterna-rock grandeur artists Piano Becomes the Teeth. For the first time, each track is meant to stand alone.
“They’re just songs that we got together and wrote over the course of a year while trying to have a good time and reclaim whatever it is that’s simple about all of this,” says Jamieson. “Don’t get me wrong, we kicked our own asses constantly and stayed up staring at the ceiling thinking about song structures all night for a year here … but being free from the yolk of having our music relentlessly try to answer the un-answerable was emancipating and humbling.”
The band’s deeply personal 2015 LP Dust and Disquiet was a concept record about grief, dealing with the emotions after losing friend and bassist Chris Friedrich in 2013. After the two years of global touring that followed, Caspian took their first-ever long term hiatus – or what Jamieson called “an overdue emotional inventory.” The reflection raised questions about the friction between artistic inspiration and financial reality, the increasingly demystified trudge of road life, and if “the healing power of music” is even a realistic expectation after all. During that time Jamieson personally traversed an “ugly grey underworld of depression, lethargy and emotional ambivalence,” inspiring the lyrics to the title track.
“Music is a mediator to the unspeakable, and the unspeakable is always by definition out of reach, moving somewhere invisibly along the closed curve of a circle,” says Jamieson. “Acknowledging all this, what if we just made an album for the simple sake of making music, with as few existential expectations as we are capable, with as much of our self-importance sidelined as possible in order to facilitate that?”
Eschewing many of the giant, enveloping wall-of-guitar build-ups of past Caspian albums, the songs inside On Circles even take circular paths, with no beginning or ends.
“Life isn’t a series of epic crescendos, ” says Jamieson. “Sometimes it’s the hint of one (‘Onsra’), or a sequential series of crescendos that come in waves but aren’t set up to go for an obvious jugular (‘Wildblood,’ ‘Ishmael’), or end up in a completely different place than where you expected, but pivot at the very last moment back to their beginning (‘Division Blues’).”

And So I Watch You From Afar

And So I Watch You From Afar released The Endless Shimmering on the 20 October 2017 on Los Angeles based record label Sargent House home of fellow noiseniks Deafheaven, Chelsea Wolfe and Russian Circles. The band left home to spend the Autumn and Winter in Europe, UK and Ireland playing their biggest headline tour to date drenching sold out audiences with their most thunderous collection of songs to date. After making hints towards more material surfacing in 2019 and a remix album nearing completion the band made some select appearances this summer, headlining festivals in Germany, Ireland and UK, closing the opening night of the revered Arctangent Festival alongside Shellac and Glassjaw. Autumn saw ASIWYFA departing to Asia before embarking on their first ever Australian tour in October 2018.

Burial Waves

BURIAL WAVES formed in 2019, and much like the seminal bands of the Salad Days era, they sprouted from an array of DC/Baltimore area bands, carrying on a balance and blend of heft and heart. They made their live debut with several shows in early 2020 just as the persisting global pandemic took its grip. This obviously halted their live momentum, but gave them the opportunity to fine tune their sound and start recording.
With the dissolution of their expansive post-rock outfit Black Clouds, guitarist Ross Hurt and drummer Jimmy Rhodes immediately reached out to their old friend Kyle Durfey of post-hardcore luminaries Pianos Become the Teeth about working on a new project. Hurt’s former bandmate Kevin Hilliard from prog-punk trio Caverns was brought on board to cover bass duties and Matthew Dowling of math rock ensemble The EFFECTS joined in on second guitar. “Everyone seemed to not just be on the same page, but started completing each other’s metaphorical sentences,” Hurt says. “We’ve all been playing together or sharing the stage together for years, so there is a great sense of familiarity with everything we’re doing.”

BURIAL WAVES’ Ross Hurt delves, “There’s a lot going on, not a ton of repetition, but it seems to flow without falling into chaos. Thematically, Kyle was always trying to write the tone or feeling instead to a part, and it becomes obvious if he’s trying to work something in that doesn’t want to be there. It all seems to take the best parts of our other efforts, use those as a very loose blueprint, and then we start to find our own sound as we fill it in.”

BURIAL WAVES are their own sonic entity, but you can certainly hear not only their individual pedigrees, but the history of their hometown in their collective output. Their initial foray into the public sphere began in early 2020 with a video of their live multi-media performance of “Cinema Shame.” The song starts with a steady, driving guitar line supplemented by a syncopated drum pattern. A grimy bass line and ethereal guitar round out the instrumentation, giving the song a heavily anchored rhythm section and helium-grade atmospherics. Durfey completes the picture with his impassioned vignette of a couple watching the history of their relationship unfold as distanced spectators. “Cinema Shame” is an apt introduction to Burial Waves’ sound—an amalgam of amp-worshipping heaviness and synesthesia-inducing space rock with a slight edge of cathartic recklessness.
Fortunately, their sound is so rich and multi-dimensional that the experience of soaking in their songs on headphones is nearly as rewarding as feeling the thump of a kick drum on massive PA speakers. Even in headphones, Burial Waves’ music can make you feel like you’re back in that dark, tightly packed room with the speakers pushing the air and the energy from the band channeling into the crowd.