reCAP :: Explosions in the Sky w/ Thor & Friends :: 2017.04.22
Words by Chad Berndtson
Photos by Andrew Scott Blackstein
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” goes the phrase, attributed to the actor Martin Mull, the oblique meaning of which bands like Explosions in the Sky seem to encapsulate especially well. In other words: Man, do you not want to write about these guys and instead just stand there in rapt absorption, letting this music pummel, stab, wash, cascade over and ultimately deliver you, knowing you’ll get more of an experience by sonic osmosis than any earthly words might come close to describing or conveying.
But here goes. Explosions in the Sky play music that begs for words like “ominous” and “portent” — it’s often heavy with the promise of something to come, and whether that something is good or bad sort of depends. Even the band’s name splits that difference; it can play triumphant ascent, hellscape descent, and everything densely layered, molten guitar- and throttling rhythm-based compositions can do in between. All of its tunes seem to have a destination; that they hit and transcend every hallmark of the post-rock genre without submitting to its many potential indulgences is why they’re considered one of that genre’s vanguard bands.
The tunes have names and maybe they matter on record, but live, they serve best to sort of subdivide themes and segments of the show. On this night, we received 10 of them, rolled out like part of a long, shapeshifting symphony. The band — five of them on tour, although six if we’re counting the magnificent light show, and we should — focused on cuts from “The Wilderness,” a 2016 album that finds the band adding synths, loop effects and other tricks to what before was a more “classically” post-rock guitar assault.
These songs all feel so big — orchestrally grand — and sometimes like running at high speed down an endless horizon, sometimes like baptism, sometimes like a set of spectral whispers, sometimes like fury and clangor. The band moves at a right-fit pace, sometimes lingering for a while in near-ambient meditation, sometimes pushing on an industrial drone, sometimes galloping forward amid a clatter of cymbals and guitar peals. It all came to a head (and a massive crowd swell) during “Your Hand In Mine” — perhaps their best-known song, and definitely one of their best — but the whole night felt as cinematic as that one does: industrial siren songs from a far-off place.
Setlist: The Birth and Death of the Day Logic of a Dream Greet Death Human Qualities With Tired Eyes, Tired Minds, Tired Souls, We Slept Disintegration Anxiety Your Hand In Mine Catastrophe and the Cure Colors in Space The Only Moment We Were Alone
