Where is all this going? That’s the immediate thought upon listening to Explosions In The Sky's debut album. Gaining some buzz on the Austin scene this album got the band signed when it was submitted to a label by another band with the note, ‘this totally fucking destroys.’ And whilst that’s true, there’s something fascinatingly incomplete about this album, a sense of a band grappling with the idea of what they might become. The immediate point of reference is obviously Godspeed You! Black Emperor but there are a couple of important differences. Godspeed was a band interested in utilizing a broad canvas on the sonic level and creating a distinct kind of musical assemblage -- a new sort of subject emerging from this combination of music, politics, composition, and instrumentation. In contrast, EITS are, on paper at least, a more traditional and straightforward band. Four or five people with guitars, but there’s a great deal of complexity within much of the music here that can easily be missed by either expecting them to be the next Godspeed on the one hand or dismissing them as just another Austin rock band on the other. There’s a sense of introspective youthfulness to this, communicated by that album title of course but also the first track “A Song For Our Fathers” which is all Lofi garage rock, shot through with slightly out of tune guitars. It’s a song that could be played with your friends in your garage at your parent's house, but this sense of juvenilia is undercut by what sounds like trains at the opening and close of the track. They were never going to stay in the garage, knocking out tracks but were always, from the opening of their debut, headed somewhere new.
From there, the album moves on to “Snow and Lights” -- there’s a kind of postrock minimalism at work here, which raises the question of what could “the band” become? Do you need eight or nine musicians on stage? Do you need to play your guitar with a cello bow? I mean, that might help, but what is interesting is the sense that EITS is a group wrestling with the question of limitation. When there are just four or five of you, how far can things go? The track also reverses the standard formal arrangements of post-rock. There’s no build but rather the track starts off from a BANG. Rather than start from the micro view, widening out into the macro view, things start from the high point, taking the widest view before narrowing into something else. What really resonates is that there’s a gentleness here -- a kind of intimate vulnerability, that manages to avoid the worst of the sentimentalism of something like early Sigur Ros that lapsed into political and emotional quietism. What helps the band avoid it on this track is that towards the end there’s the sound of urgent drumming, like something banging to get in, suggesting a bigger and stranger world, bubbling under the surface of the group’s work.
Following that comes “Magic Hours” which is more of a straightforward postrock track with the long slow build, but maintains the overall mood of the album, making the track feel introspective and sorrowful. This is cut through by the drum riff that kicks in in the last three minutes adding some urgency -- a kind of heartbeat of something struggling to come into being. It’s a musical kind of growing up cut through with the buzzing guitar right at the end that adds some weight and forward motion. As the album comes into its final section sections, the track “Glittering Blackness” is all big noise, thick textures intercut with simple strumming, bass notes dropping in like rain. There’s a wonderful moment as things suddenly cut off for a moment of silence on the transition into “Time Stops”, a genuine moment of shock, bringing you as a listener back to yourself. It’s the musical equivalent of a jolt, like falling asleep and then coming back to being awake. Thrumming throughout the final half of the album is more of the gauzy melancholy -- but it was at this point that I realized that it feels like the sound of things bubbling under the service, rife with possibility. To put this in more philosophical terms, the album seems to embody the musical articulation of the Not-Yet.
For Ernst Bloch, this was a vital philosophical concept that linked ontology, history, and politics. For Bloch, the new was never entirely unexpected but could be seen in some form in the conditions of the present. There’s some ambiguity here because Bloch’s German phrase could be translated as both “not yet” or “still not.” It is neither talking about just the past (this has not yet happened) or the future (this has not yet arrived) but both at the same time. There is a complex philosophical articulation of the ways in which things have not yet come into their full realization that runs throughout Bloch’s work, and it’s this that comes to mind when listening to the closing of the album. The structure of tracks feels like something still being refined -- the EITS which would become familiar through film soundtracks and Friday Night Lights is not yet complete, but the forms and shapes of what will be have not yet fully developed. Right at the close, the listener gets one final example of this in practice -- the final four minutes feature another big release, some distortion, noise, and buzzing that ultimately overtake the simple layered riffs, twisting it into something new, the possible emerging from the conditions of the actual, dialectically proceeding from what is and what could be. Where is all of this going? Does it all make sense? How strange innocence might well seem, when we have the chance to look backward and see there in the earliest forms the ways in which the new is threatening to break in, even if of its arrival we can only say Not-Yet.
LISTEN TO IT HERE: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_loP0WaicURl50BWIjZ-vOKzAUPUhH0i8Q
beautiful!