Someone forgot to tell post-rock that mixing the formula up every once in a while is usually a good thing. The epic instrumental genre has been caught in a slump for quite some time now, with the power-players of post-rock failing to spice up the stumbling scene. Godspeed You! Black Emperor haven’t released anything since 2002’s Yanqui U.X.O, or “ho-hum, another album about the apocalypse but not as good as every other LP they’ve ever put out.” Mogwai’s 2006 effort Mr. Beastwas met with critical disappointment. And what has Tortoise even done recently?
So, as post-rock anxiously waits for some sort of sonic savior, Austin-based Explosions in the Sky, the genre’s most anthemic and optimistic (not to mention seemingly only non-Canadian) band release yet another long-player, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. Its songs are sweeping and guitar-centric. Just like there last album, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place. Or the LP before that one, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die. Or their debut, How Strange, Innocence.
There are two ways to tackle All of a Sudden. On one hand, you could look at it in comparison with the rest of their discography and conclude their latest effort sounds exactly like every other disc they’ve released. But, on a more specific level, All of a Sudden is a perfectly fine collection of massive instrumentals, even though the album is the group’s weakest effort to date.
Most Explosions songs follow the same blueprint: There’s a soft opening, a big build-up tapering off into a delicate middle section, followed by an emotional eruption which eventually fades back into calmness. Opener “The Birth and Death of the Day” steadfastly follows this formula, beginning with restrained feedback before a belting guitar epically sweeps in, only to wander into a more subdued jam. The song does little to indicate the group is ever going to step away from the soundtrack style they’ve been using for, oh, eight years.
Every subsequent track follows “Explosions’ Law” to a T, with very little room for variation or new ideas. “Welcome, Ghosts” sounds plucked straight from the Special Feature options of the Friday Night Lights DVD, while “Catastrophe and the Cause” comes off as a The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place B-side, complete with the same starry-eyed guitars littered across that album. Explosions in the Sky have built a very comfortable but epic-sized house, and they feel just fine staying inside it for now.
Even if All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone lacks creativity, two songs stick out as above-average cuts. “What Do You Go Home To?” is the album’s most introverted piece, a piano-and-bell driven meditation that gets rambunctious only once or twice, making it lack the same cry-for-attention attitude held by its cousins. The song is Explosions at their most tender and controlled — and it’s gorgeous. The album’s slow-burning centerpiece, “It’s Natural to be Afraid,” clocks in at an impressive 13 minutes, and sees the group pacing themselves, so their musical explosions (lol) actually carry some emotional weight when they burst out of the guitar-driven serenity preceding it. The open spaces of “It’s Natural to be Afraid” make it one of the group’s better long numbers and the album’s finest moment.
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is a good-enough album, full of fine tacks plenty capable of being slapped with the “epic” tag. But Explosions in the Sky’s latest is more of a troubling confirmation that post-rock, one of the more wide-open and boundary-less genres around, is going through a rut where bands coast by on what they’re accustomed to doing best. Here, a very talented band just sticks with the sound that made them noteworthy in the first place. It’s a problem plaguing the post-rock genre.
But hey, Do Make Say Think has a new album coming out next week! Maybe it can breathe some life into this comatose genre.