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.
