By Fiona Donnellan.
Gangs is the latest release form the Belfast band and The Button Factory was the chosen launch pad to hightail this highly anticipated 2nd album into the atmosphere.
The venue was set, mainly testosterone fueled fans were fixed and ready to go, anticipation monitor was off the scale and they didn’t disappoint; they came out all guns blazing in fact.
I love watching a band that you know would be rocking out just as hard even if you weren’t there and this band knows how to rock a venue, the place was a sweat box and that was before the major moshing even started.
The adjectives huge, massive, colossal and mammoth get thrown around willy nilly with these guys, they are notorious for their live shows and as a relative new comer to the ASIWYFA phenomenon I am now under no illusion that their live shows are just that, nothing short of perfection. Their guitar rifts were indeed huge, the drums colossal and intricate guitar sounds mammoth. They compelled me to start rocking out, an excellent trait in any band.
They have a huge following and you could feel the love in the room, fans were alive with the energy of the band, clapping, shouting and yelling along. Their instinctive live performance style rallied the crowd into a good auld fashioned Friday night frenzy, with one guy even managing to pull off the best bit of crowd surfing I’ve seen in a while, a couple of kicks to the face later he was still going, to the delight of the elated band and crowd alike.
Tracks like Search and Rescue and 7 Billion People All Alive at Once especially drew the internal mental out of people, a upbeat song, starting off quite slow and building into a massive track of dense noise, in true post rock style.
I hate to draw too many comparisons between bands of the post rock genre because although they can be lumped under the same heading, ASIWYFA have a much more effortless hardcore rock element. But basically if you love Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky with a little more edge then you’ll love these.
They unleash their tour on the rest of the world now but they love gigging so don’t worry they will be back to rock another day!
