Explosions in the Sky
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone (Album, Bella Union)
The key to any good album is starting strong…and that’s exactly what 'All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone' does.
The key to any good album is starting strong…and that’s exactly what 'All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone' does.
The drums arrive like Tchaikovsky’s canons 30 seconds into opening track 'The Birth and Death of the Day'. It instantly blows the guitars skywards in a million tiny little shards that twinkle their way back to the earth for the next 43 minutes.
This is an intricate and tender record. The euphoric thrust of the aforementioned opening number is counterbalanced by long passages of elegiac melancholy. Though the album does meander in places, it generally recovers in majestic fashion.
Just as on their previous opus, 'The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place', the crescendos are rousing and the lulls are as equally seductive.
Indeed there is a more than a passing similarity to such previous works. Whereas the likes of Mogwai seek to constantly evolve their take on a genre cryptically referred to as “Post-Rock” - to varying degrees of success - Explosions… appear to have settled on one easily identifiable sound. As with Japanese contemporaries Mono, they perhaps play things a little too safe and hence ultimately fail to reach the ethereal heights previously scaled by the likes of Canada’s Godspeed You Black Emperor!
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is an accomplished record and what Explosions in the Sky seems to have found is a niche. Certainly it’s currently far too artistically rewarding to be referred to as a rut, but if they keep pacing back and forth it will get gradually deeper.
Explosions in the Sky play Glasgow ABC on Tuesday 17th April
> Chris Cusack
