I.
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 kind of subject emerging from this combination of music, politics, composition, and instrumentation. In contrast, Explosions In The Sky 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 in 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 the garage at your parent’s house, but this sense of juvenilia is undercut by what sounds like trains at the opening and closing 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, and it is fucking cool 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 a 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 -- functioning as 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 to so many listeners 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 overtakes 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 it’s arrival we can only say Not-Yet.
II.
As soon as you see the date right? The second album from Explosions In The Sky got a huge amount of publicity when it came out. In the liner notes for the album there is a picture of a plane, along with the text ‘This Plane Will Crash Tomorrow.’ The album itself was released in early September of 2001 but sometimes this is how it works, right? Sometimes, the future arrives before we think it should, and sometimes things can make themselves true. Of course, you can read the whole thing as just coincidence and thus we can secure the wholeness and surety of our sense of chronology. That said, the album art by David Logan, inspired by the Angel of Mons, connects the record to this idea of breaks in temporal continuity. Angels are, of course, heralds of the future, the ultimate avatars of eschatology where the future is not just coming, but is here. The album art reminds me of the other famous leftist angel, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the angel of the New, blown back through a shattered history by the storm of progress. Sometimes, time shatters and the ordinary progression of chronos lapses into kairos wherein the world can be remade, and seen in a New way.
The album opener, ‘Greet Death’ follows the loudness dynamics of their previous record, which reversed the normal standard of post-rock of the quiet building into loud. Here the track starts with some crunching drums which are layered over by simple, but compelling riff work. It lasts a couple of minutes before collapsing into distortion. What emerges is something gentle, somber, and almost melancholic in the track’s middle third, all brushed cymbals and slide guitar. What powers the track, and, I think, much of the band’s work is an interest in antagonism -- the creative (and perhaps even destructive) tensions between irreconcilable dualities: quiet/loud, triumph/despair, darkness, and light. The final resolution of ‘Greet Death’ isn’t into anything quite so neat as harmony but into a pulsing, distorted noise. ‘Yasmin the Light’ follows a similar pattern, beginning with the gentleness missing from the end of “Greet Death” before just rocketing off into some ferocious drum work and noisy, almost frantic guitar work, before resolving back into something genuinely almost serene. Music is a constructed thing, and here you sense the construction of a distinct group of musicians operating in ways that are designed to subvert and overcome the expectations of their listeners.
Over at Pitchfork, the reviewer seemed almost critical in their piece on this album, accusing the band of being overly ambiguous, telling stories that the listener had to project themselves into, to fill out the meaning. The final line of the review is ‘may these songs become a soundtrack to your vanity,’ a deeply baffling line in at least two ways. Firstly, the band here is so much less restrained, hesitant, and ambiguous than they were on their previous record, and secondly, the whole point of Explosions In The Sky (and I argue post-rock as a whole) is that it cannot foster this kind of self-involvement by its very nature. We hear this and are taken out of ourselves. The strange delicacy of the slide guitar on ‘The Moon Is Down’ is alienating -- post-rock does what the best culture can do, it gets you out of your head, returning you to yourself with greater emotional and musical complexity. In a sense then, Explosions In The Sky are making music for the person that you are not yet.
‘Have You Passed Through This Night’ is one of the few post-rock songs which has lyrics of a sort and makes the band’s political and philosophical commitments a little more clear, whilst pushing the scope of what they are trying to do into something that matches the eschatological use of angels on the album art.
This great evil - where's it come from?
How'd it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who's doing this?
Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we mighta known?
Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?
The vocal sample used here echoes the album artwork, the Angel of Mons appeared to soldiers, whose bodies fed flowers in fields when they were cut down by bullets. Does our ruin benefit the earth? This isn’t just a historical question either -- have you passed through this night? Haven’t we all -- and perhaps the most uncomfortable answer is that yes, maybe there is this darkness in all of us too. The guitar work shifts to the back of the mix and the drumming sounds utterly incredible, a flat slab of sound that is irresistible, something with which you simply have to join in. When the guitar comes roaring back it becomes clear that the gentle contradictions of the opening two tracks here have their darker side. “Greet Death '' was gentle, almost a relief, yet here there is genuine anger and force, a raging against the dying of the light that pummels the audience into the collective ground. Sonically then, the point is not to resolve the contradiction: to favor one side of the antagonism over the other but work through and accept both. In so doing we find a dialectical view that expands outwards, transforming the listener along with the structural understanding of the album as a whole. “A Poor Man’s Memory” follows immediately onward, and transforms the drumming into an almost military, marching style beat -- until its final two minutes, out of nowhere just explodes, with breakbeat drumming and a heaviness that so much of the rest of the album always veered away from at the last minute.
The album closer is an epic twelve-minute track “With Tired Eyes, Tired Minds, Tired Souls, We Slept” that starts with a fuzz or distortion out of which emerges a genuinely beautiful guitar melody, and the drums to give the whole thing so narrative shape. It’s the track that is most reminiscent of the band that seems to be the influential touchstone, Mogwai. But again, early Mogwai had a distinctive way of building their walls of noise, whereas Explosions In The Sky’s compositional structure is marked by a real sense of restlessness: the twangy guitar at three or four minutes in sounds strange and out of place but that very strangeness is precisely the point for a band looking for a way out. A four-piece guitar band doesn't have to be making twelve-minute-long instrumental movements and a post-rock band shouldn’t be the same thing as a punk outfit from Texas, but even in their very structure as a band, the group refuses to neatly resolve away dialectical tension. Seven minutes in, and the song is in full swing, with guitar work that sounds otherworldly like it’s coming from out there somewhere. The final two minutes of the song start to bring things back together, returning to the simple patterns which opened the track but the process has made what these patterns mean deeper and more complex, with ambiguity and contradiction moving outward in the dialectical process of thought. Listen, and you’ll hear that for yourself.
III.
It’s the use of the word “Not” in the title that really grabs your attention, at least for me. There’s a real commitment here to something positive and future-oriented. The earth is not a cold dead place is a deeply bold statement to make in the middle of the war on terror and the seemingly unbreakable hegemony of right neoliberal politics across much of the world. Of course, what this begs is this obvious question: If the earth is not cold and dead -- what is it? Or, to put things another way, what could it become? Already it seems we are in the realm of utopian philosophy. The album is relatively short by the standards of post-rock, just five tracks with each one coming in at around or just under ten minutes in length and all of them manage to approach these questions, of what the world is and could be in various rich and emotionally resonant ways. The opening track, the ten-minute “First Breath After Coma” starts with a single pulsing guitar note, the sound electronic and unsettling, like listening to a hospital machine, tracking a pulse. Then in comes a bass drum, forming the background of the track knocking out a steady rhythm of a human heartbeat.
What’s notable here is the continuation of the philosophical interest in the contradiction that has been mediated through the musical arrangement. The drums and guitar lines tease out the intricacies of one another, staging in the music the group's intellectual and artistic impulses. The tone of the track is euphoric, an awakening to a new sense of the world, as the drums move from the pulse of a heart to the marching and martial style of drumming that brings together crowds and masses. At just over four minutes in, the track takes a moment to catch its breath, twisting and distorting in its own wake before resolving into another delicate melodic pattern, all shimmering guitar notes and bell chimes. It’s a track that speaks of the beauty that comes in waking up to a world more redolent with possibility than you previously thought — when you see beyond the flat phenomenology of capitalist realism and spy the incomplete processes at work in which Utopia can be glimpsed. It culminates in a glorious, punch-the-air crescendo, a joyful catharsis, and encouragement to wake up, stop your dream and see the invisible presence all around us.
Following that comes “The Only Moment We Were Alone” which on the level of tone moves from the masses to the particular, shifting from the general mode of address to something more personal. In a way, it becomes less interesting as it seems like something more suited to the kind of things a four-piece punk rock band would come up with, marked as it is in the opening sections with some solid rock drumming and guitar lines. The reason that’s disappointing is that it seems a little too neat for a band that has always been interested in trying to get out of and subvert the restrictions of ‘this is what a rock band should look like.’ By four or five minutes in, it feels very personal in tone, almost the closest thing post-rock has to a romantic moment, something to dance with (not alongside the masses in a new kind of subjective becoming) but with the person you love.
Despite finding it a little less ambitious than the opening, what consistently impresses about the album is both the delicacy of musicality married to the boldness of emotionality. If Sigur Ros were all too prone to naive sentimentalism, then Explosions In The Sky are achingly, desperately sincere. In an era of seemingly inescapably cynicism and pandering, cheap emotionalism there is something so jarring and alienating in the sheer honesty of what they are trying to do. The middle third of the song fully hooked me and by the time the absolutely glorious guitar freakout kicks towards the song’s close, the emotional and sonic weight of what they are doing pummels the listener into the ground. Hope is not just a feeling but it has an imaginative and emotional component and the band uses its sound like sandpaper to get under the skin of emotional distance the listener might have. “Six Days”, the shortest track on the album (just about!) punches along thanks to, again, the superlative drum work but meshes so well with what came before. You really can’t listen to the album in an order other than the one this was recorded in, precisely because to do so disrupts the clear progression of sound and idea, one into another. On an album so relentlessly hopeful, “Memorial” might initially seem like something of an odd choice for a song title, particularly in the mournful opening moments, which are trembling with grief. Yet hope is not the elimination of loss. Hope is, in a way, about the redemption of the dead, a philosophical and ontological idea that would make all the unfulfilled potentialities of the past mean something. What does history get built into? Memorials are not simply relics of something gone, but signposts towards the future, their permanence an invitation to a kind of construction. That’s what the song does, a building exercise, taking the noise of grief and absence and solidifying it through repetition and expansion.
A memorial is an invitation to solidarity and given that it makes sense that the album closer would be another invitation to that too. “Your Hand In Mine '' forms the more major key pair to the minor key sonic affect of the previous track. It’s all bright, crisp drumming that shifts into some of the best guitar melody patterns on the album. If the album has been romantic, here they sound as if they are pushing towards the new kind of collective being that post-rock as a form is uniquely capable of bringing into consciousness. It is perhaps worth returning to the question of the title here: why isn’t the earth a cold dead place? For Explosions In The Sky, the answer is simple, because of your hand in mine, because of our potential which enables us to reach out of the past in all of its ruin and incompleteness and stretch towards the future together.
IV.
Between 1999 to 2015, the American record label, Temporary Residence Limited had a series of releases called Travels In Constants. It was a 25-album collection released by bands who had signed to the label or who the label had approached to put together something for the collection. Mogwai released something back in volume 12 and the great band Low was behind volume nine. In terms of Explosions In The Sky’s development, this album comes immediately after they were asked to provide the soundtrack for the West Texas set American football film, Friday Night Lights. On paper, that’s a deeply strange move for the band -- instrumental art-rock scoring a sports movie -- and not just a sports movie, but an American football film? I don’t have the time or space to cover the soundtracks the band has contributed to, but the Friday Night Lights soundtrack is fascinating precisely because of the way it shows how hope taken from history can easily turn to hope in history. Or, put another way, utopian future-oriented thought can easily lurch into nostalgia. On the FNL soundtrack what’s so notable is the extent to which it is very gentle, musically speaking. There’s an excision of much of the drumming (which gave so much of the previous album its weight and dramatic resonance) and the guitar melodies, whilst as impressive as ever are much more straightforward, leaving the album as a whole feeling a little soporific. The emotional tonality of the music gets contracted from sweeping melodrama to a kind of cinematic sentimentalism, entirely in keeping with the ideological baggage of an American football movie set in West Texas.
All of that is to say that Friday Night Lights represents a kind of shift in style (towards something perhaps more marketable) and perhaps more worryingly a shift in content away from the idea of the future subject and towards something more nostalgic. Remember what people said about the original Explosions In The Sky demo: it. fucking. destroys. But the soundtrack absolutely does not. So, approaching The Rescue is something quite apprehensive because it feels like a hinge point between two possible versions of the same band. The album was made in just two weeks, giving it an immediacy that the polish of a soundtrack necessarily excludes. Structurally it’s eight tracks, recorded over eight days. There was no new material pre-written: the band would write and record a song all in one day. Days one to eight were about writing and recording and then the remaining days were about mixing and mastering. What’s immediately striking after the previous album is the delicacy (not gentleness) of the opening track Day One, shot through with some bright, crisp chimes and a relaxed and rather free guitar build. There’s drumming here too but it’s brushed rather than hammered home.
It is a relatively uncomplicated and happy song that sees the band sounding closer to the mid-2000s Sigur Ros as opposed to Mogwai. Day Two keeps the same delicacy but what’s interesting is the band’s choice to branch out a little, focusing on piano rather than guitar. I think the push into this new kind of instrumentation is what helps them avoid the vapidity of sentimentalism here and it’s a genuine surprise when you hear vocals for the first time. Voice is used as a kind of texture -- there are no real lyrics but some really quite impressive vocal harmonies. There’s a genuinely lovely moment at the break of the song when you get to hear the band crack up with laughter just as you might have thought they were building up for a more traditional chorus.
If the opening two tracks had a kind of charming low-stakes joy to them, the band undercuts this again in Day Three which opens with them talking about some hard economic truths to the background of some ambient noise and guitar lines:
We were just informed that our van has a shot transmission, and the only option available to us is to spend $1400 on a used transmission.
We'd be here for a couple days, which means I obviously won't make it back to work on time, and which means I'm going to be completely, utterly flat broke. Or in debt. But we have no choice, and this Astro 2000 (the van) is now officially…
Our van was making some funny noises as we were driving into Syracuse, and we took it to the mechanic today and they told us that our transmission was shot, and that it would cost anywhere from $1500 to $2500 to fix it.
And we're in Syracuse, like, thousands of miles away from home and we have 40 dollars in the van fund...we're fucked.
Suddenly, not so free and easy. The freedom and lightness of getting to make music in a couple of weeks collide with the hard reality of trying to be a musician. The stakes aren’t high but there’s a sadness here, the music straining to emerge into something more coherent and melodic whilst getting distorted into a distant wail of ambient noise. If Day Three is a sad and lonely day, day four picks back up the emotional thread of the opening two tracks, with its clear and punchier drumming and really beautiful piano flourishes. Day Five finds the band in a cinematic mood again, with chimes returning to the mix to augment the piano in contrast to the echoing guitar. It is perhaps the most emotionally uncomplicated and joyful thing the band has yet recorded, a sunlit walk to the park with a friend that is irresistible.
Day Six is, I think, the strongest thing on the album and sees the return of the band’s reversed sound dynamics, wherein we start with (by this album’s standard) a colossal opening crescendo, all distorted guitar and smashing drums and some uplifting piano that cuts through and adds a tonal lightness that keeps the whole thing from feeling jarring from the album as a whole. After a minute or two that all melts away to then reintroduce the instruments in new forms. The band manages to make their guitars sound like violins or a string section, marrying together the dynamics and scale of post-rock with an intimacy of form that is both surprising and transformative. Day Eight ties everything really neatly, another gentle piece of experimentation. Whilst the band may have shifted in terms of their style, what is so interesting about this record is the way in which often very small shifts in tonality bring out latencies and potentialities which otherwise might have been missed. The sound of the future is not always in the sturm und drang of noise, but in the simple sounds of piano phrases.
V.
In doing the research it’s strange to see how critical reception changed and shifted from the moment to moment of each record's release. All of A Sudden I Miss Everyone got, on the first release, what is best described as a muted response. In the genealogy of post-rock, this doesn’t necessarily come as a shock. 2007 is something of a strange year for a post-rock album. After all, Godspeed was in the midst of their decade-long hiatus and Sigur Ros was soundtracking the most mawkish moments of American TV. In that year, what was post-rock for, if anything? After the experimentations and lightness of their previous album, Explosions In The Sky went back to what they knew worked and it seems like the majority of the critical response found this album to be doing similar things to The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place but less well or less consistently. So, what is post-rock for? As all of the albums under consideration in this project show, in various ways, the point for post-rock is the exploration of concepts through music and ideas. A band like Godspeed does this in a maximalist way, through the accumulation of instrumentation and a specific pattern of composition and orchestration. In contrast, Explosions In The Sky are a more straightforward noise rock band with ambition. So, what is that ambition directed towards on this album? It’s probably worth pointing out that the exploration of different ideas and concepts doesn’t necessitate a shift in form. After all, bands like Godspeed You! have been doing the same kind of thing for their entire career, and within that shape is space for all kinds of experimentation. So, is the band still making music for the person you might become, or have the forms of quiet/loud dynamics and art-rock chorus ossified into something overly familiar and repetitious?
From the title of this album, there is an immediate air of melancholy -- even loneliness -- the previous Explosions records haven’t approached. The opening track, “The Birth and Death of The Day” feels far heavier than expected thanks to the album that came before but the emotional tonality is immediately familiar. The opening is vintage Explosions In The Sky, a thrilling sunburst of rock noise but the limitation of the grandiose opening is that there isn’t necessarily anywhere for the track to build to. All the noise fades out and a drumline kicks in, over which they layer a bright, clean guitar melody, cut with some shimmering high hat work from the drummer. The band has always been good with theme and mood, with the specific narrative being something generally avoided. In contrast, this is perhaps slightly more literal than expected -- it really does feel like the start of a day, rife with possibilities. It properly takes off about four or five minutes in with some furious drumming and a sense of pace and intensity that more than matches their earlier classic albums. So, birth from the title, but the death only really comes in the final minute, a cutting out the drumming to its echoes, tapped out on sticks rather than drums themselves. It’s a perfect lead-in to the second track, with its glorious Gothic title of “Welcome Ghosts.” Possibility carries with it the notion of incompleteness, the implication of loss. As Mark Fisher pointed out, and further back Derrida too, all kinds of presence carry with them the shadow of an absence. The guitar melodies from the opening track move to the background, as the opening of this track is dominated by some stomping drums, eerily close to something pounding on your door late at night, trying to get in. And when it gets in, the guitars come back with something so bright and clear that it’s impossible to read the ghosts in a negative sense -- those that are welcomed are the harbingers of the new, breaking into the present.
“It’s Natural To Be Afraid” is the title of the next track, opening with some glitchy, echoey noise and the guitars here sound haunted and haunting. If the ghosts have been welcomed previously here is the sound of the dialectical inversion -- the desire not to welcome the New but cast it out, to close down and police the terrifyingly porous border between what is, and what could be. The track rumbles with tension, escalated by the buzzing and furious guitar that increasingly becomes unignorable around three minutes in. However, a minute later the track transforms into something rather gentle, with what sounds like a woodwind instrument (an oboe, possibly?) leading the piece through the next movement, shifting the emotional dynamic from tension and fear back to something more melancholic. Yet, this swings back again after around nine minutes returning to the tension but here adding a clearer melody line and the return of the band’s signature drumming. If emotionally the track is very interesting, narratively things are slightly more difficult to parse -- there’s a lot of Sturm Und Drang here, expertly delivered, but it is not hard to see why critics saw it as a lot of sound signifying nothing. Perhaps with a group that spent so much time soundtracking and scoring other stories, they’ve not got the same impetus to tell us their own.
From the longest track to one of the shortest — the next song is just five minutes long. “What Do You Go Home To?” reintroduces some piano (not heard since the previous album). Here are two melodies counterposed, giving some needed friction to the actual content: you hear something being worked out, a series of questions in a sonic form that suit the melodic sustain and release of this group's sense of style. There’s a hesitancy to this which gives space and breathing room to the question of the title. The album closer, So Long, Lonesome, is even shorter and again has a delicate hesitancy to it that makes it one of the more interesting ideas on the album. Returning to the piano, and utilizing some beautiful phrasing in the opening, the track opens out wonderfully into the back half, keeping the delicacy of the piano and supplementing it with some more great drum work. I can see why this album didn’t perhaps get as much immediate love as the band’s earlier records: the longest song could easily have ended about seven minutes in, and whilst the form has never been more refined the more delicate and open tracks show the band could have moved from the drama of their formula towards something more hesitant and open. This is the thing about the New, it requires not just a belief in the potential of the future but a willingness to let go of what we cling to so tightly. If post-rock demands a leap of faith from the listener -- that if we give off our attention and being to it, we might find something New, I can’t help but feel that the same is true of the artist. The New, in whatever form we might find it demands restlessness from us, and a willingness to let go of what has worked before. Failure is a risk, and for hope to be a thing at all, it is a risk to be embraced and not eliminated.
VI.
The end of the last album closed with a track called “So Long, Lonesome” -- it isn’t like many of their other songs; it was a delicate and gentle track that carried a sense of…finality. It felt like a farewell to something. And by 2011, it isn’t difficult to see why -- their sound had stubbornly clung to the formula of loud/quiet dynamics for a decade, and whilst so many other post-rock groups expanded their instrumentation or moved towards electronica or other new elements, Explosions In The Sky stuck to their guns, a rock band with ambition. The ossification of form is always a real danger in the construction of an aesthetic, wherein the content becomes less dynamic because what attracts the listener is that it comes in the right shape. So, at the end of the last album, I was cautiously hopeful that the band would keep the ambition and marry it to a degree of formal experimentation. Yet that isn’t quite what this album does: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Take Care takes much the same form as their other albums, with evocative titles, and six tracks, and all done in less than an hour.
The opening track, “Last Known Surroundings” has an echo of the finality at the close of the previous album but when the opening drops, I immediately found myself thinking, ‘We’re back here again.’ It’s by no means bad and as my time with Explosions In The Sky has gone on, I’ve become ever more impressed with the work of drummer Chris Hrasky in particular, whose distinctive patterns and force carry the track as a whole. There’s a howling, distorted guitar that cuts against the relatively simple melody adding some much-needed texture and timbre to the track too, deepening and enriching what would otherwise be just one more Explosions In The Sky Number. After the wave of goodbye to the formula that was the previous album, this opening track can’t help but raise the question: what does it mean to get over something, to move beyond it? Or, in other words, what does it mean to be post-rock? The problem that EitS have always run into is the unresolvable contradiction between their aesthetic ambition and the form they took of just four guys with guitars and a drum kit. Increasingly the band didn’t like the label of post-rock: “We’re just a rock band” they said. If that’s true then we have to confront the fact that rock has never been more irrelevant. I mean, for god sake the biggest rock bands in 2007 were Seether and Linkin Park. If post-rock’s progenitors emerged from the collapse of punk into no-wave then in 2007 could you honestly look at Linkin Park and Explosions In The Sky and say, “Yes, these bands play the same kind of music.”
Now, this isn’t just to say that generic labels are much more elastic than they might seem but that categories are not neutral. I think it would have served the band well to embrace the label because it would have allowed them to say quite clearly, that what they do is not THAT. And in line with the classic definition of post-rock that Simon Reynolds popularized back in the mid-90s, there are lots here that fit. The haunting guitar that is eerily close to human voices in the background on the second track of the album, “Human Qualities” is a really good example of the band using the instrumentation of rock for non-rock purposes. It adds depth and emotional complexity to what is going on here, fading out into some distant drumming that sounds like a heartbeat. If the opening of the album made me think that things were in danger of becoming too familiar, there are musical flourishes and small touches throughout the second track that drive home the fact that no, this isn’t just another rock band in any clear or simple sense of the term.
The track is a great example of the ways in which post-rock depends upon the relatively simple patterns of rock music but adds complexity through both repetition and difference. The heartbeat drumming shifts to pulsing guitars and a big blow-out climax subverting the band’s usual pattern of loudness into quiet. But just as you think the album might be settling into a groove comes the next track. It’s not even four minutes long and honestly is the closest the band has come to doing like an indie-rock single: it’s the track at the live show that everyone would clap along to, which doesn’t mean it’s bad but that it underscores the ways in which the album really showcases the band struggling to be something, caught between the dialectical tension of post-rock and just being a rock band.
“Be Comfortable, Creature” is almost the longest song on the whole album and it is, in comparison, initially quite soothing. Gentle guitar lines, delicately pieced together for the opening minute or so before the drums chug back in, reassuringly. Can post-rock start to sound nostalgic after a while? Can the sound of the future, wherein we find new modes of subjective experience lose its alienating strangeness? Because that’s what this song is: maybe even what the whole album is -- the feeling of coming back around to something and someone you’ve already known. There’s something eerie about that, that can’t be dismissed -- the strange undercurrent of the familiar still retaining its capacity to shock you. The album closer begins with what sounds like voices on the edge of hearing and sustains the sense of something threatening, trying, to break in through much of the beginning three or four minutes. Yet, when it finally comes, there is something glorious and joyful about it as the melodic patterns build and build and build, layering off one another before cutting back to just the simple guitar line to allow for everything to come up for air. In the back half of the track the voices on the edge of hearing return, underscoring the tensions I’ve been writing about throughout. Where is all this going is the question that I asked, writing about Explosion In the Sky’s debut but as the voice fades out here at the end of this album, it seems like the band themselves are still not quite sure. I like that they are still asking the question though.
VII.
After their previous album, the gap between that one, and this one didn’t really surprise me. For all of its polish, “Take Care Take Care Take Care” seemed like the band drawing a line under something. It seems like a record that is caught in the slippage between POST and ROCK and whilst it was still a good record, it was also one of their most emotionally unsatisfying -- at least for me. After that record, the band went off and spent a lot more time soundtracking various projects, adding their grand emotional compositions to a whole host of media, some of which I think are a good fit for them and some which are a little…odd? (I’m still not sure how they ended up on The Power Rangers soundtrack but there you go).
So, after a few years of that, which for jobbing musicians must be both fun and probably pretty financially rewarding, the group reunited in 2016. As soon as you see the year, right? So, is this going to be a political album -- something that tries to re-engage with the particularity of the present? No, and to be honest, such a move would be somewhat obvious for a band that has always taken a more oblique approach to theme and tone. What is immediately noticeable about the opening of the first track, Wilderness, is the ways in which the band’s sound has changed and deepened. Electronic blips cut through the guitars and there is even, in the smallness and intimacy of the sound, a sense of scale. The addition of electronic noise and delicate beeps and chimes is the band scoring the sound of empty space, but where in previous albums they rushed to fill that space with the clamor and noise of guitar riffs, here they seem happier to let the silences breathe. Scale is not always about spectacle but when they do go for the classic formula of a post-rock build and release the additional textures make it shockingly joyful.
“The Ecstatics” with its synth blips and burps is a wonderful way to continue the album, sustaining the evocation of space, but where the first track feels very meditative -- the sound and feeling of surveying a vista -- midway through the second track the emotional tone spins on a dime. There are many different ways we can relate and theorize space and the bassy buzz which opens up into a bright guitar line is not about the experience of a view but about the movement from one kind of space to another. “Tangle Formations”, the track which follows is a little longer (honestly a post-rock song under five minutes is still a shock to the system) and foregrounds both drumming and piano. There’s something slightly cold and remote about the production -- not in the sense of a pejorative but in the idea that this sound is coming to you from a long way away. And then! Three minutes in and the track opens up in the most stunning way: there’s some rock drumming, pounding out a beat underneath some sparse piano work capping off the opening three tracks that seem to be about a kind of sonic psychogeography of remote landscapes. From there, the album moves to other kinds of space — tracks four and five are, if only from their titles about an internality. “Logic of A Dream” is Explosions In The Sky doing a kind of early Peter Gabriel-inspired psychedelia, droning and ambient before the drums roll in and over you, with a sliding guitar moving you from the dream to wakefulness. Dreams are open to interpretation. Bloch criticized Freud for his focus on the dreams that come in the night-time because they are intrinsically about us sorting through what has happened to us, which cut against the Utopian forward momentum of Bloch and his fascination with daydreams -- that which could happen. Yet to look inward is not to forgo the future. You wake up in a new world after dreaming, seeing it in a strange and transformed way. That said, it is impossible to ignore the truth that it is in our internal mental spaces that we can feel the most alone. The album’s high point absolutely seems to be concerned with the loneliness of internality. “Disintegration Anxiety” is a jittery drum line and nervous riff in the guitars and it drives along.
Given the band’s success in scoring visual media, it is almost impossible not to think of the scene that could play out here to this song -- something heartbreaking, something you are afraid might happen. It is rich and emotionally resonant but fundamentally double-edged because the anxiety of disintegration is also at the same time the sound of something new coming into being. I don’t want to feel it all sometimes, to go through the world as I am, and the Utopian promise is that not only can the world be remade into something, that history can be redeemed (to put in it Benjaminian terms) but that subjectivity itself can be made anew. Once again, the band is making music for the person you might become in the future, looking back at who you are now. The tremulous, almost hesitant “Losing the Light” continues the theme as from the anxiety of the previous song, something fragile, beautiful, and contingent comes into being. Over at Pitchfork, the reviewer said that the band had finally made an album that sounded like their name. Like an explosion in the sky, there’s something beautiful and captivating happening here, even if it takes a while to reach us here and now.
But stop, listen, and linger.
Look upward with those that you love next to you and hear what could be.
Transmission Ends.