MY EDUCATION - Italian

"One part space-rock cacophony, one part

punk-rock sonic deconstruction, and one part bad ambient trips": these are

the ingredients of the hybrid sonic cocktail called My Education, as

stated by the band on their website's homepage. The blend

seems complex and rather intriguing, but in practice it turns out to be

fairly familiar, already well tested in many productions of the last

few years.

The original sextet from Austin, arriving with this

"Italian" at their second album in six years - after the self-produced "5 Popes" from 2001

- is in fact positioned along the ideal path traced by groups such as Godspeed You! Black

Emperor e i concittadini Explosions In The Sky,

presenting a long (over an hour in length) and complex work, in keeping with the

by-now well-established tradition of that strain of post-rock which weaves together moments of

orchestral romanticism with decidedly noisy emotional surges.

This becomes

clear right away on the opening track "Snake In The Grass", whose

highly emotional atmospheres can't help but recall the familiar blueprints

of apocalyptic post-rock; however, even from this track, one senses a

certain inversion of some of the genre's conventions, since the

track's progression isn't the classic gentle, romantic build-up leading to a

final explosion. My Education in fact display, here as in other moments of

"Italian", a remarkable compositional and emotional variety, achieved through

the alternation and juxtaposition, within the same track, of swirling

guitar passages and more orchestral ones, dominated by strings, like

the one that forms the very core of the opening track. While this pattern

seems partly followed in some of the album's nine tracks, the attentive

listening to them reveals a plurality of solutions capable of transcending –

or at least broadening – the by now narrow confines of

instrumental post-rock compositions.

Thus, the excellent "Plans A Through B" presents a

slow, percussive stride, around which guitar distortions revolve,

strings and even an organ, while "Thanksgiving" and "Texas Style" manage to

thin out the band's less accessible expressive register, through chords of

liquid guitars, chasing each other and sketching sonic arabesques that recall

early Tristeza at times, evoking clearer skies rather than dark apocalyptic

oppression. In these passages, as well as in the classic-sounding "Puppy

Love", in which the piano rises to become the guiding instrument, even the

most emotionally intense moments gradually lose their dramatic components,

taking on instead elegiac tones much closer to the Explosions In The Sky of

"The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place" than to bands with a more

openly aggressive sonic impact, such as Japan's Mono.

The varied

experiences of some of the band's members (some of whom are also

members of Stars Of The Lid) stand out in the two ambient interludes

“(Polyphonic Walnuts)” and “( )”, moments of expansive calm amid the emotional storms

the album is so rich in, while elsewhere (“Dirty Hands” and especially

“Green Arrow”) lyrical orchestral openings marked by piano lines

alternate with walls of guitars substantial enough to justify the space-rock “ingredient”.

Although the structures of many of the compositions included here

closely recall those of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions In The

Sky, “Italian” reveals a deliberately raw approach, free of excessive

formal polish, and its variety is enough to set My Education apart from

the many mere followers of a style already created and widely explored

by others. Granted, the Texan band doesn't add anything radically “new”

to the musical territory it occupies, but its

approach, undoubtedly genuine, reveals a compositional sensibility such as

make “Italian” at least a pleasant listen, though it's recommendable

exclusively to genre completists.

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30/04/2026