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Review: 'EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY'
'The Wilderness'   

-  Label: 'Bella Union Records'
-  Genre: 'Post-Rock' -  Release Date: '1st April 2016'

Our Rating:
Explosions In The Sky from Texas play music for imaginary movies.

For The Wilderness, their sixth album, the film in my head is set in a rugged yet spectacular landscape far from the anonymity of an urban metropolis with a plot in which flights of sci-fi fantasy squeeze out elements of social realism.

The more composed and detached mood of these instrumental tunes could have something to do with the fact that this is the first EITS record not produced entirely by the four-piece band. This time they have worked closely with long time collaborator John Congleton in a co-producer role.

As John Peel often used to say "This one starts quietly". It opens with Wilderness, the title track, and finds our heroes exquisitely poised in a place somewhere between high drama and soppy sentimentalism.

This leads into The Ecstatics, just three minutes long and so delicate and understated that one quickly abandons any notion that the band will be settling for the security of the quiet-loud post-rock formula.

Tangle Formations further establishes that strong melodies are the order of the day so any inclinations towards conventional stadium-pleasing dynamics are held strictly in reserve.

Logic Of A Dream stirs into life like a giant awakening while, at the mid-point of the album, the slightly more conventional rock groove of Disintegration Anxiety could be used for our movie's obligatory chase scene.

Thereafter, the four songs that follow take the listener on a voyage into what the band label as the infinite unknown, utilizing various concepts of 'space'. both physical and mental, as loose co-ordinates.

Losing The Light has a deconstructed Biosphere style ambient pulse and prepares us to launch from planet earth (Infinite Orbit) to explore Colors In Space, a track that opens with abstract atmospherics before mutating into an insistent motorik beat and a 'Day In The Life' climax that ends abruptly.

The final track, Landing Cliffs, guides us gently back down to terra firma to end a beautifully sequenced journey that we immediately want to embark on all over again.

Explosions In The Sky's website
  author: Martin Raybould

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EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY - The Wilderness