Kevin Bronson on August 15th, 2014

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Call this “Say Yes,” Take 3. When resurgent L.A. sextet Afternoons finally release their full-length, “Say Yes,” on Oct. 21, it will be a milestone for band, four of whom (Brian Canning, Steven Scott, Brent Turner and Aaron Burrows) comprised the pop quartet Irving back in the early ’00s. The band, which grew to include Claire McKeown, Sam Johnson and Tom Biller (who has since departed), made a “comeback” of sorts early this year. You might have read their tale in the recent LA Weekly piece, but here’s the short version: After “Say Yes” was embraced by the late, great radio station Indie 103.1 in 2008, Afternoons did the residency dance, played Goldenvoice’s short-lived Detour Festival downtown, got big-time management, changed their name, scrapped a bunch of their old songs and, in 2011, released an album as Shadow Shadow Shade. And not much happened for them.

Now, absent a lot of that buzz (and the management), they have regrouped to resuscitate a lot of their old songs under their old name. Which brings us to “Say Yes,” the song that inspired the Shepard Fairey poster [below]. It’s a call-to-arms anthem like Arcade Fire makes call-to-arms anthems, at least in its original form. On Afternoons’ original EP, it was a 4 1/2-minute battle cry in the war against gloom, announcing itself with blaring horns and a massive chorus. On the Shadow Shadow Shade album, “Say Yes” [hear it here] was truncated to 3 1/2 minutes and lost some of its electricity. And on the forthcoming album, which also revisits songs from that long-ago EP (“Love Is a Western Word” is one of the keepers), the horns are replaced by the wonky synths you hear in the video above. The video is re-purposed from the Shadow Shadow Shade days – it’s a mini-documentary made by O’Shea Read on an immigrant worker named Alonso Alejo Lopez. [I guess we should delete this post?] As Afternoons showed at a couple recent shows, they can still bring the house down. If you loved the early versions of their songs, the new ones will take some getting used to, but if Afternoons are new to you, welcome to the party.