Suddenly, you’re immersed in heavy vibrations from strange metal, wood, plastic, and even synthetic material attached through long wires to human beings, all of whom are moving frantically in an exodus of some strange form of self expression interconnected with a perpetuation of sonic alien force. OK: Let’s check into reality. Last time you checked, you were in a bar. Its fall in the Shenandoah valley and the leaves have been dying off like a herd of buffalo. You’re here in this rather quiet low key place, you’ve come for some beer on a Thursday night and you had some songs lined up in your head to play on the jukebox. The songs that were always there… You know, so you can rock out a little bit while remaining on your bar stool, drinking subtly, maybe some head bobbing to familiar tunes between conversations with your fellow, equally mellow bar patrons. So when you got here, you saw there was a band playing tonight. Ok, a band. Probably a cover band right? A bar band? You’ve always got that small handful of people, usually of the female variety, drunk and giddy, dancing, but no mass collection of people having a genuine moment with the music they’re listening too, true absorption so to speak. Now, an hour later, you’re standing up, you’re tweaked out on this band and the wall of sound bombarding you won’t let you stay on your stool. You’re buying a round of shots for everybody and you feel like someone pulled a plug out of you like a vacuum cleaner and plugged you up to an electric socket of some kind. Full blown jam out…WHO THE HELL IS THIS BAND ? and then arms, torsos, and legs lift, shake and bump, you freeze in moments of climatic paralysis induced by heightening guitar and intensifying rhythm, and the explosions will let you go eventually to collect yourself again, right up until the next wave. Its After Destiny. After Destiny? Is this just a pit stop along some crazy tour they must be on? The answer is, they’re just playing this local bar for kicks. They play because they love to play. And this music has yet to rock enough souls. Its SUCH a FINE LIVE SHOW, however, that it would be a shame for it to stayed harnessed in such a localized format. This is how this works.
There exists, in the pockets of America where no cultural hysteria brings in any documentation that would further perpetuate the cultural hysteria, musical forces with a knack for doing the creative thing quite well. They’re doing it with passion, depth and awareness, in touch with some higher vibration. Local cult followings are formed, and if this word of mouth gets out and has the right timing and opportunity, this following will grow. The live musical experience is shared, shared amongst fans and the band, and a life form of its own is created, a force of beauty, of good times, a lucrative escape into higher dimensions that let us forget ourselves and become one again. In this case, it’s this jam out collective from northern Virginia, After Destiny. This band is playing music with PASSION. These guys have the love for it and its explosive. Watching A.D. live is an unpredictable, always unique musical experience that can will take your brain for a ride and drop you off shaken and all tingly inside. And they still have the second half of their set to play.
There’s Tim on guitar. Tim rips out riffs frantically, riffs that’ll dabble into a nearly speed metal lucidity and follow up with alternating multi-genre dabbling benders that’ll catch majors and minors with amazing timing, capricious and rhythmic, interchangeable in its structure, vast but completely on point. Then the vocals: Crooning and bellowing soulful vocals. Tim sings like Les Claypool went back in time to 1970’s Motown. There’s been shows where Tim will breakdown some guitar and ramble a crazy, tweaked out dialogue, or a vague story, and simultaneously bring the progression of this crazy vocalization through the song between frantic jam outs into its explosive climax. He doesn’t just do vocals, going through the motions every set. No, he sings with feeling and even this can become an improvised version of what was originally intended. Tim is musical powerhouse, no doubt.
You’ve got Jonathan on Bass. A groovy mixture of picked and slapped slabs of funk, the backbone to why you’re shaking your body… if Tim’s the cognitive head rush, Jonathon is the primal body mover, the catalyst to it all. The theme to this band seems to be their unpredictability and ability to jam out and take each song in a place that can never be recreated, and Jonathon personifies this and never seems to run out of steam. He and Tim are brothers, and it’s almost as if there’s some kind of telepathic understanding as to what each is going to do next…conjoined musical entities pulling and tugging each other around the banks of an explosion, until they both dive in and swim their own strokes to the other side.
Of course, if it was just bass and guitar, you’d more than likely just stand there. This is purely the science of the sound: The guitar, bass, those forces need their thunder, their pure primal drive, their heartbeat. That’s where Jon comes in on the drums. Think frantic, trance infused and crash crazy. Jon has been known to hook up his drums with the cowbell JUST IN CASE, because he’s all over the place. He’ll create a rhythm that is always successfully dancey and driving as hell, and will fit into the constant change more of his style and array of crashes, fills and percussion that fit the gaps that could just as successfully be ignored. He dances with the drums, a feathery lightning bolt moving around the drum set hitting everything with sharp, crisp, on point and dance crazy pizzazz. Again, Jon is completely aligned and synchronized with everything that’s going on, and this is the formula that takes them onto a new level live.
This is jam music. After Destiny is a live band, and they can only truly be experienced as such. No recording in a studio can do justice to the versatile nature of their music. This is stuff that hits you on a deeper level. It’s instantly so familiar, that feeling to dance and groove, JAM OUT! Feelings that just formulate and boil up and become something so big its beyond the framework of your own rationality, and you’re just bobbing, strutting, waving, shaking, jumping, grooving, (or just taking in with enthusiasm) the soul and the rhythm and gut punch of some complexity that leads you to realize the primal connection we have to vibration… energy… Something that, perhaps, is actually a catalyst to the universal nature of ourselves, our collective connection. Our collective tapestry that we all can touch base with and yet lose touch with just as easily and quickly. Those that can master and harness that energy need to be heard. There are politics and business procedures involved in the world of ever growing musical talent that jeopardize the source of profit (music) in exchange for profit itself. This can happen in at any point in a bands livelihood, and often times in these scenarios the band is back to where it started, totally DIY and all the struggles that come with that. But when money and politics taint good talent, directly or indirectly, the potential for genuine and passionate music to be experienced by a broadened and larger amount of music fans is lost. And this is a casualty to the world of music and what it means for the people that really care about it. There is good music, and those that have seen and heard them can tell you, that AFTER DESTINY is a band that can give you a nice heap of god damned GOOD jam music. These guys need to tour and get their sound out. Hungry ears are waiting.
