Explosions in the Sky was becoming rapidly popular by word of mouth about their scorching live shows, but after the band composed the soundtrack of "Friday Night Lights," the 2004 film about high school football in the band's native Texas, the band's popularity exploded.
The quartet of Mark Smith and Munaf Rayani (guitars), Michael James (bass) and Christopher Hrasky has justified critics' frenetic praise and their tag as an indie phenomenon with their fourth album All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone.
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone continues the band's emotive approach to songwriting. It is a middle road between the fierce and aggressively beautiful metal-tinged Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever and the beautiful lyricism of The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place.
The music doesn't need lyrics to be evocative; instead the band relies on drastic dynamic shifts, slow building of tension and nearly chaotic crescendos.
Chords, drenched in reverb and distortion, open "The Birth and the Death of the Day," the first track. A second guitar enters, soaring gently and hopefully above the first. The distortion gives way to pleasant arpeggios and an inviting theme. During the climax of the song, the firm march-like drumming keeps the soaring guitars firmly tethered to the rest of the sound. It's nearly chaos but still beautiful.
The composition segues into the second track, "Welcome, Ghosts," suggesting that even in destruction, there is beauty and a new beginning. The symbiotic interplay of guitars on "Welcome, Ghosts" drives a song that never seems to settle; it wants to come to a break, a standstill, but can only keep hurtling towards its conclusion.
The haunting ambience of "It's Natural to be Afraid" mixes tense arpeggios and a horror-film piano score, eventually evaporating into ambient noise out of which a song of lyrical beauty escapes. The melodies move enchantingly, entwined and grounded by steady but forceful drumming. It is simply a gorgeous song.
The highlight of the album is "Catastrophe and the Cure," which shifts dynamics drastically from "What Do You Go Home To?" The song hearkens back to the more aggressive sound of the quartet's first album. The crunchy distortion and heavy reverb creates waves of ambiance that threaten to destroy the calm and order established in the previous song. The song moves as though it is on fire with shifting dynamics and sudden breaks interrupting the flow before the song erupts again.
The gentle-closer "So Long, Lonesome" is a fitting resolution to an album concerned with the movement towards beauty out of violence and destruction.
For Explosions in the Sky, the lack of lyrics allows its music to adopt further thematic meaning. The song titles invite listeners to approach a song from a certain vantage point and to interpret the music based on the song titles, giving All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone a sense of longing and beauty that comes from the pain of moving away from a comfortable past.
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is another powerful album from Explosions in the Sky and will bolster their already aureate reputation.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
