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Explosions In The Sky, a quartet from Austin (Texas) fronted by guitarists
Mark Smith and Munaf Rayani pushed the wild dynamics
of Godspeed You Black Emperor
to new heigths (sonically speaking) of epic instrumental post-rock.
After a tentative self-released
How Strange Innocence (2000 - Temporary Residence, 2005), the proper
debut album,
Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die (Temporary Residence, 2001), indulged
in oblique strategies of sudden self-annihilation, in traumatic stylistic u-turns:
the pounding ecstasy of Have You Passed Through This Night? (unnecessarily ushered in by two minutes of spoken vocals),
the massive riff of Greet Death (followed by interstellar guitar tapestries that, after three minutes, relinquish all power to a gentle Eastern-tinged melody),
the mellow strumming of Yasmin the Light that explodes in a terrifying guitar freak-out and then resumes again as if nothing had happened.
The 10-minute tinkling fantasia Moon is Down (that, unfortunately, picks up speed and volume in the last three minutes)
sounds like King Crimson's Moonchild for the age of hyper-terrorism,
stately while dejected.
The highlight is the closing 12-minute
With Tired Eyes Tired Minds Tired Souls We Slept, that strives to find
a balance between guitar impressionism, Glenn Branca-esque minimalism and
Indian raga, and, after a fibrillating crescendo, ends up recycling upon
itself.
Chris Hrasky, Munaf Rayani, Mark Smith and Michael James had mastered the
praxis of improvisation/composition that had been appropriated by post-rock
after being refined over the centuries by classical music (the fantasia) and
by jazz (the jam).
The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place (Temporary Residence, 2003) is
relatively upbeat and way less catastrophic. That means pieces such as
First Breath After Coma and The Only Moment We Were Alone are
not quite as menacing as the ones on the debut, and the
requiem Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean is actually quite moving,
and Your Hand in Mine is almost tender.
But they remain, fundamentally, copycats of
Godspeed You Black Emperor's most basic
technique.
The general feeling of dejavu is redeemed by Memorial.
The six instrumentals of
All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone (Temporary Residence, 2007)
fullfilled the promises that had only been sketched
on previous Explosions In The Sky albums.
For better and for worse, Explosions In The Sky had become an
assembly machine of carefully-executed post-rock dynamics.
The eight-minute The Birth And Death Of The Day barely hints at
an epic riff but prefers to indulge in a lulling duet of simple gentle
melodic fragments. It suddenly erupts in a loud, colossal
shoegazing tidal wave propelled by massive drumming with one guitar's
soaring, wavering hymn-like melody pierced by the other guitar's petulant
fits, an exercise in post-psychedelic call-and-response.
The 13-minute It's Natural to Be Afraid opens with a refrain that
sounds like an ancient music-box against the menacing backdrop of a buzzing
noise. However, they both die out and are replaced by a pastoral flute-like
moan and a mellow dual-guitar lullaby. The song dies again and restarts as
an even softer and looser improvisation. Finally (four minutes from the end)
it picks up steam in earnest, chirping wildly like a bird at sunrise.
The most insistent piece is the eight-minute Catastrophe and the Cure,
in which the wavering counterpoint of the guitars runs its course
without discontinuities.
Not only are they impeccable pieces that could be used as instruction
manuals for apprentice post-rockers, but they also bridge the gap between
one transcendent form and another of instrumental music.
The impressionistic vignette Welcome Ghosts is the psychedelic equivalent of John Fahey's instrumental transcendent acoustic folk fantasies.
What Do You Go Home To is dissonant chamber music,
with the guitars emulating piano and cello.
A (tedious) bonus disc contains an entire remix of the album by several artists.
Take Care Take Care Take Care (Temporary Residence, 2011) probably
marked a decline in inspiration, temporarily masked by a sophisticated
exercise in digital noir arrangements and by the exuberant imagination
of drummer Chris Hrasky.
Mark Smith then formed Inventions with
Eluvium.
They released the albums
Inventions (2014) and
Maze Of Woods (2015) and
the EP Blanket Waves (2015) containing two lengthy compositions,
Blanket Waves (14:12) and Hearing Loss (11:52).
After scoring several film soundtracks,
Explosions in the Sky returned with the single Disintegration Anxiety
and the album The Wilderness (2016) that contains humbler songs,
compared to the past, and more electronic sounds, but basically sounds another
film soundtrack, not particularly cohesive and certainly not revolutionary.
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