Previously the music would have risen gradually to a heavenly crescendo, instead of ending suddenly on an unresolved fadeout, well before the five-minute mark. No album by artists this sensitive or intelligent is going to be a complete sell-out. But it's certainly the band's weakest offering since "The Rescue" : a shallow wade into lukewarm waters from a group more accustomed to the raptures of the deep. While i love post-rock, i am quite underwhelmed by this debut. In fact this is pretty much post-rock by the numbers and to me sounds like Mogwai light.
The album incorporates a lot of the post but seems to leave out the rock on this one unlike their future releases. What we get are some nice and pleasant guitar riffs that play on and on and reach a climax but nothing on this one really satisfies.
This album was released in well after other post-rock greats like Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Tortoise were doing much more interesting things. If you are a fan of minimalism then you may like this one but i just find it a tad underwhelming. The variety is almost nil and the mood building episodes notorious of post-rock doesn't build many mountains, but considering this music comes from the moderately hilly landscape of central Texas, then i guess it perfectly suits the band's surroundings.
A pretty average album in my book. And once again I find myself apologizing for the hothouse flowers of my over-fertilized prose hardly inappropriate in a Progressive Rock forum, you would think. I had already heard a few isolated selections from the album, on their page here at ProgArchives and at the band's own web site.
But absorbing the entire thing in a single, uninterrupted sitting was a revelatory experience, by turns uplifting, mournful, triumphant, cathartic, elegiac, and devastating. It's no wonder my rhetoric turned purple in response.
On a strictly emotional level the closest kneejerk comparison would be to the majestic year GY! There's an almost symphonic grandeur to the album that Beethoven or Wagner might have recognized and applauded, beginning with the nine-plus minute intro "First Breath After Coma": a brilliant title, by the way, for such transfiguring music.
And yet there's also a disarming simplicity to the arrangements and performances, wistful and delicate one moment but overpowering elsewhere. The music achieves its apotheosis in the awesome climax of "Memorial", rising gradually from a series of long, overlapping guitar sustains toward a pyrotechnic release of dramatic tension, before reaching graceful resolution in the beautiful coda "Your Hand in Mine".
All five of the album's tributary movements combine into one broad river, flowing together more smoothly than any other EitS effort before or since.
The writing is likewise more intuitive, and the balance of sound more natural: the expected bursts of fuzzed-out noise are less abrupt, and the drumming less reliant on over-produced boom-thud cacophony. To be honest I wasn't expecting anything more than the usual Post Rock epiphanies, aglow with higher purpose but stuck in the same shining rut.
The typically long-winded, moody yet hopeful album title; the lovely but reticent artwork by Esteban Rey Stephen King? But musically it remains one of the defining albums of its kind: a desert-island essential in the remote Post Rock archipelago.
A word of advice, however: don't cherry-pick samples as I first did. Immerse yourself fully in the unabridged minute aggregate, and again, with apologies! His performances often feature projected visual art Search Directory.
This Will Destroy You. Yndi Halda. God Is An Astronaut. Do Make Say Think. The Evpatoria Report. Saxon Shore. The Genius Of…. By Gary Walker. A complete statement The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place is perhaps the definitive post-rock album, its cascading notes and shimmering atmospherics soaring and plummeting over 45 minutes filled with euphoria, hope and heart-pausing drama.
The December issue of Guitar Magazine is out now! Read More. The November issue of Guitar Magazine is out now! The October issue of Guitar Magazine is out now! The September issue of Guitar Magazine is out now! The August issue of Guitar Magazine is out now! That's all it is. Which is true. Post-rock bands tend to share exactly two things in common: Their songs clock in at eight minutes or longer and any singing is frequently reduced to droning Gregorian chants or, in the case of Godspeed You!
Black Emperor, vaguely anarchist monologues. Whatever post-rock may have meant at its inception in the s and early s with bands like Tortoise and Stereolab, it's now become indie-snob speak for "instrumental music that's too heavy for Kenny G but not satanic enough for black metal.
But such a vaguely defined genre puts bands like Explosions in the Sky in the awkward position of being compared to contemporaries that they may sound nothing like. The aforementioned Godspeed You! Black Emperor is post-rock. Even glitchy electro-rock bands like 65daysofstatic are lumped into the gaping void of the genre.
And that sort of sweeping generalization makes a band's need to distinguish itself critical. For their part, Explosions in the Sky have distinguished themselves not as a post-rock band, but as a cinematic rock band.
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