Explosions In The Sky - From silence to violence

Granted, talking about explosions in the sky these days might seem inappropriate. But on the day they formed (July 4, 1999), Explosions in the Sky couldn't have known their name would turn into such a macabre prophecy. And when they even put the image of a plane bearing the words "This plane will crash tomorrow" on the inner sleeve of their album, they couldn't have imagined what would happen a few months later either. Either way, when it comes to this Texan quartet, you shouldn't get hung up on the name. What matters is the quality of their music: epic and vivid, reflective and wild at the same time.

After debuting with How Strange, Innocence in 2000, the band released Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever, a surprising album in that it manages to range across different genres without absorbing their clichés, instead enriching them with a healthy dose of inventiveness and improvisation. Michael James on bass, Munaf Rayani and Mark Smith on guitars, and Chris Hrasky on drums (all from Midland, Texas, except Hrasky, who hails from Illinois) conjure up a surreal atmosphere, combining dreamlike melodies and soundscapes with layers of dense noise-rock bordering on cacophony. Their starting point seems to be above all the instrumental anarchy of Godspeed You Black Emperor!, but that's only a departure point. Theirs is a carefully aimed combination of punk spontaneity and post-rock cerebralism, a measured fusion of melancholy and energy. The languid, understated tones are just a pretext to lull the listener into a trance, from which they're suddenly jolted awake by obsessive drum cadences and tightly wound guitar runs. "From total silence to total violence" is the band's declared motto.

The overture of "Greet Death" opens with 50 seconds of simple sonic flutters that serve as a prelude to a sequence of driving riffs, in a progression that is at once epic and gripping. "Yasmin the Light" simulates a heartbeat, in a kind of lullaby, accompanied by guitars that alternate between quiet and taut. "Have You Passed Through This Night?" also starts off slow, with open, spacious sounds that almost seem to evoke the endless expanses of Texas, before plunging into a sea of abrasive, searing guitars. And it's precisely these explosions that make Explosions in the Sky's music so dramatic and moving — explosions achieved through refined guitar work in the mold of masters like Joe Satriani and Robert Fripp, paired with a martial, powerful rhythm section.

It's a sonic blend of great emotional impact for a young band (the oldest member is 27), yet one that already seems to possess remarkable chemistry: "We played together for the first time in April 1999," the four recall. "And something felt clear and right from that very night." Something that clearly didn't escape Kat Candler either, who wanted Explosions in the Sky's music for her film "Cicadas": "I saw the band live a while back," Candler recalls. "And they were truly astonishing, almost moving in the intensity that came through in their music. I asked them to score my film, and the result was wonderful once again."

There is indeed something romantically impetuous about the Texan band's music, a kind of dark storm of emotions bursting out of the notes. In short, they've got the goods. And the following, if somewhat uneven, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (2003) confirms as much, with its refined harmonic textures that don't just rely on the usual alternation between quiet moments and genuine sonic explosions, but unfold gradually around a subtle instrumental weave. It would take a full four years for the follow-up to The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, during which the band was far from idle, developing the gentler, more descriptive side of their art first on the Friday Night Lights soundtrack and then on the mini-album The Rescue.

Although those works seemed to suggest the band's attention had shifted mainly toward crafting slow-building emotional tension rather than its impetuous, at times violent release, the following All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone (2007) at least partly brings Explosions In The Sky back to their familiar, well-tested coexistence of striking, at times fairly raw immediacy and an emotional depth so subtle it almost feels repressed. From the striking opening of "The Birth And Death Of The Day" onward, though, it's clear there's no abandoning the band's signature emotional drive in favor of a more restrained layering of instruments: bursts of guitar and austere rhythms, liquid textures and surfacing rough edges define the just-over-forty-minutes of an album built almost entirely around the gradual construction of a latent tension, punctuated by slow but rarely conclusive crescendos within complex compositions, whose emotional peaks sometimes even preempt the softer passages we're usually used to seeing overwhelmed by guitar fury.

The coexistence and interplay between pronounced bursts of intensity and impalpable harmonies is the focal point of most tracks on All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone, faithfully true to the genre's conventions, which are at most simply reshuffled, nearly always yielding a familiar result — polished to excess but, perhaps precisely because of that, not entirely effective. Better, then, is the slow evolution found in the two tracks under five minutes long, marked by a linearity that stands out sharply against the complex movements of the rest of the album: "What Do You Go Home To?" and "So Long, Lonesome", where the atmospheres grow distinctly rarefied, with tension remaining latent and never fully released ("What Do You Go Home To?"), or dissolved from the very start through piano notes of unusual serenity, even if they culminate in a hint of a moderate, almost obligatory final surge ("So Long, Lonesome").

Since rhythmic and guitar-driven explosiveness now risks becoming a mere stereotype of the genre — even as a standout, fully enjoyable element in some of this album's tracks — what endures above all is the subdued, carefully weighed instrumental groundwork, through which the Texan band manages to channel its emotional potential into a less conventional, more even-keeled formula, free of sharp jolts yet more effective than the leftover crescendos and repetitive, thunderous detonations.

Another four years go by, but little changes in the Texan band's formula: Take Care, Take Care, Take Care brings back all the defining traits, in the form of long compositions in gradual evolution and an execution so meticulously precise it borders on displays of technical skill — though this doesn't particularly undermine the impressions this kind of music has always aimed to evoke.

Within the folds of the album's six tracks, however, alongside numerous miniatures of fine instrumental craftsmanship, slender gaps emerge between guitar phrasing and dry rhythmic cadences, filled with silent ambient passages and, for the first time, rounded out by ethereal, distant vocalizations, in some ways comparable to those introduced by fellow Texans Balmorhea in the tracks most tied to the wild harshness of their home territory. A further point of partial departure from the past can be found in the slightly more measured and, in some cases, sourer tones of the compositions, which show that, in their artistic maturity, Explosions In The Sky clearly prefer weaving composite yet serenely descriptive harmonic textures over relying on endless repeats of thunderous detonations — which, still, are not entirely absent over the course of the album.

Overall, though, these elements aren't enough to overcome the pervasive sense of standardization, which makes Take Care, Take Care, Take Care something very close to a collection of standards — as if classic post-rock had become akin to jazz, with even some of its original standard-bearers having given up hope of escaping the genre's narrow confines, choosing instead to focus almost exclusively on the formal aspects of their music.

This time only two years separate the Texan quartet's return to the scene, which also coincides with their first foray into the world of film scores. The opportunity comes from David Gordon Green who, driven by his passion for all things post-rock, had gotten in touch with the band ten years earlier to secure the rights to use "The Moon Is Down" in the score for his "All The Real Girls". It was on that occasion that the director forged a friendship with the Austin quartet that went well beyond a simple professional collaboration, to the point of deciding to bring them back on board alongside his trusted David Wingo — composer of the original soundtrack at the time — this time for the entire score of his latest film, Prince Avalanche. The result is a soundtrack in the purest sense of the term, with all the pros (cinematic) and cons (musical) that implies: from the short length of the tracks to the bending of the sound to fit the needs of the scenes, not to mention sacrificing much of the stylistic traits typical of the quartet's music. Much of these brief chamber-like sketches with their fleeting melodies actually seem to belong mainly to Wingo, who manages to reduce the American band to a small orchestra under his own direction. When the band does break free of those boundaries, a few standout moments do surface: but the graceful "Join Me On Avalanche", the majestic "Alone Time" and the closing crescendo of "Send Off" can't quite shake the impression of a classic, dutifully completed "homework assignment" done without much feeling, and the wasted opportunity that comes with it.

Five years on from Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, EITS returned to writing original material for the LP format, taking a break from what had by then become a parallel career as film composers. Their sixth album, titled The Wilderness, was however heavily shaped by the new direction the Texan band had taken, setting aside the furious noise explosions of their early work in favor of electronics and airy, atmospheric moments. A few convincing tracks aside, the album is in all likelihood the band's least successful, and very probably also the least loved by fans.

End, Explosions In The Sky's seventh studio album, earned the Texan band praise from label-mate (Bella Union – PIAS) and former Cocteau Twins member Simon Raymonde, who, in a heartfelt message to the band, said he was grateful for the strength and love he felt while listening to the record. Listening to it — less devoted to EITS's trademark quiet-loud alternation and delightfully suspended and dreamlike as it is — it's easy to see why the album won Raymonde over.

Looking closely, aside from "Peace And Quiet", which is literally split between a first half of light guitar embroidery and an explosive second part where sturdy distortion and an insistent piano come thundering in, End is a very balanced record, where the emotions don't flow as abundantly as in the past, but rather emerge through the constant tension running through every track. The band's brooding over death and other, less final, kinds of ending — such as the end of a romantic relationship — has in fact led to the writing of 7 tense, evolving tracks, closer than ever to a soundtrack approach.

With its ticking electronics and the electricity running through it from start to finish, "Ten Billion People" seems to soundtrack a crowd full of stories pouring into the streets of a big city in the morning; while "Loved Ones", with its drones crackling in the void like the howls of ancient mastodons, feels better suited to more solitary, reflective places, whether physical or of the soul.

Interweaving ascending guitars, off-beat rhythms, electronic inlays: "All Mountains" carries us upward, all the way to the mountaintops meeting the clouds on the album cover. Here too, the climb, which in the past would have led to a thunderous, searing explosion, instead flows into a calmer finale, one meticulously arranged down to the smallest detail. The band's obsessive attention to detail, aided this time by production veteran John Congleton, culminates in the closing "It's Never Going To Stop", a track dense with interwoven guitars and keyboards that leave nothing to chance.

Just like 2016's The Wilderness, their last LP before seven years of silence, "End" doesn't seem designed to stun and overwhelm the way the first, unforgettable works by Mark Smith (guitar), Michael James (bass, guitar and keyboards), Munaf Rayani (guitar) and Chris Hrasky (drums) did. With a bit of patience, and by making the effort to understand this new era of the band, though, it will be hard to miss the beauty and intensity of many of its passages.

Despite a title that might seem to announce the end of a journey, the seventh album by the Texan post-rockers is not their last. As the band revealed in a press release, they are already at work on the soundtrack for a new TV series, though no details have been disclosed so far.

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