And Also

Music Review
The Wilderness

Rating: ***
Artist: Explosions in The Sky

The conscious decision by a rock band to go on without a vocalist is to be admired. Explosions in The Sky, the post-rock quartet from Texas, have put out a new album. Famed for composing the soundtrack of Friday Night Lights, the group has come out with The Wilderness: a record with nine tracks which, at just a shade over 45 minutes, must be their shortest album. It is also probably the band’s best work since The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003). When you think of EiTS’s music, the absence of a vocalist does strike you at the back of your head, but it’s the scale of the album that you look forward to. In The Wild­er­­ness, the songs are not sagas of yore as How Stra­nge, Innocence (2000) for exa­mple, but shorter and, dare I say it, peppier, with more of a punch. They still send you into quiet-contemplative territory but are not the 12-minute epics that build up into an orchestrated frenzy. Also, the tracks are standalone and not recorded to form part of a bigger story that you kind of exp­ect. Yet, Disintegration Anxiety and Losing the Light, which come bang in the middle, still send you back to the  same canvas that EiTS started out on; still brooding, and throwing up some memorable pieces of music.