So, one may ask themselves, "What is/who are Explosions in the Sky?" You might be tempted to answer, "They’re a five piece celebrated, post-rock outfit hailing from Texas, quickly approaching their 19th anniversary." Or, a as fellow audience member mused to his slightly inebriated friend next to me, “They’re like Radiohead without lyrics, or like singing. They’re like ambient, y’now? Like Sigur Ros. It’s what college kids would listen to.” I’d say that’s selling Explosions terribly short, but such an assessment isn’t a terrible betrayal of the truth. This is music that you know you’re either going to adore or feel rather disassociated from. Hating it would take a strong distaste for strongly observable talent.
Opening for the post-rock luminaries was Thor and Friends, yes Thor Harris from Swans, playing a couple of rounds of hyper-minimalist, oddly stoic xylophone-centric ambient work. It was a good stage setter with a rather restricted range that felt like a calm before a storm. So in premise, it was a rather superb pairing, if not perhaps too droning for some.
Without much fanfare, Explosions took to the stage and got right into it with tracks like “The Ecstatics” and “Greet Death” displaying a range that immediately varied from ear shattering bombast, to deeply hypnotic ambiance. It wouldn’t be improper to label Explosions a superbly dynamic group, that plays incredibly challenging, but immensely rewarding music. The kind of music that really, truly is best experienced live.
And what a live experience it is, something parallel to some monstrous bout of synesthesia, where feeling the sound is just as important as hearing it, where one song simply bleeds into the next in a series of ever engrossing and varied movements. Some bands just flourish live; they do away with the overly produced constraints of the studio and cut loose, utterly possessed, reveling in the flaws, struggling with tuning live, wrestling with a living sound and demanding attention with their performance. Explosions is just that, letting arpeggiated guitars drift over beds of harmonic glee that are broken with thundering percussion and fluctuating effects pedals. Sound alone is telling stories and micro narratives that always end with a crescendo of unbridled emotion, the band themselves always reciprocating it through their phenomenal stage presence, thrashing, tossing, stomping, almost like they were going to burst out of their skin.
When you can make music that sounds like a deeply heavy if not contemplative, car commercial look like a damn contact sport, you’re doing something really right.
The setlist, was exquisite ranging across the entirety of their work; there was no encore, as there shouldn't ever really be one. It’s a ploy psychologically to do so, and Explosions is too honest for that — they're just too confident in their abilities to do something that somehow would cheapen such an experience, so they played a full set and walked.
In summation, Explosions in the Sky live is something deeply affecting, at times verging on being rather cinematic, like a live soundtrack being performed from some obscure art house film from the future,. You know the kind that you tell your friends you saw, but really didn't. It’s really a symphony fit for dreams, you ponder it in reflection, you escape to it when in need, you live through it as much as you experience it — and Explosions delivered fully on that experience.
This article appears in Apr 13-20, 2017.