19. Explosions in the Sky: The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place
*Last week’s Albums Project entry was published in the St Augustine Underground. Below is the original, uncut draft in the usual formatting.
“Old Town” Comes Alive
The first time I saw Explosions in the Sky perform was inside an emptied swimming pool in the middle of the oldest city in the country.
It was a place called The Alcazar, whose indoor pool was said to be the once-largest in the world. Set beside streets echoing with the faint clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages, the outside had a Spanish vibe about it, curved and weathered red roof plates patched around a dirty stone exterior. Its insides had been fitted that night into a music venue from what used to be a two-floor café/shopping court, which was renovated from an antiquated hotel, which was made into that from whatever it was before.
The space wasn’t a concert hall, not even a proper club or bar. Its acoustics were rough, set rigid in pillars and arches of chilled cement. You could count on one hand the gelled light rigs they’d use for effects. For seating, there were worn brown fold-outs lined down what would be the deep end of the pool. The band set up in the shallows.
I don’t even remember drinks—not even a merch booth. We filed in like you would a movie theater, taking our seats and not talking too loudly. This wasn’t your normal concert crowd, all fanboys and old tour tees. It was a mixed bag, a lot of college kids, a lot of stragglers.
A lot of waiting for the show to start.
But in its own way, the atmosphere was impressive. The mood inside was awkward but memorable, like a model squeezed into an outfit two sizes too small, trying desperately to pull it off with a little bit of grace. The setup was anything but perfect—a kind of anti-stage—anything but expected.
That’s what gave it its charm.
Desensitized by the separation inside arenas and corporate venues, you really don’t know how you’ll respond to a setting this intimate until the music starts. I couldn’t figure out at first how this band—maybe not a marquee group but one with a real name in the instrumental “post”-rock community (the guys behind Friday Night Lights’ soundtrack, etc.)—came to be playing at the bottom of a swimming pool only 25 minutes from my house. And for only ten bucks a ticket.
At the first gentle hum of distortion, though, the first wave of true emotion, it started making sense.
These guys don’t write traditional rock songs; they birth mini-symphonies, patient and throbbing with hope and life. When they played, it was like the whole world outside stopped existing for them, as if it were just their equipment, the crowd, and The Alcazar. Eyes closed, shirts darkened with sweat, they fell to their knees and played to the floor, on their backs, curled into frantic submission—slaves to the sound rushing out from their fingers.
They didn’t talk much between songs—the show wasn’t about that. They only thanked the audience for showing up, as if our presence there served as some silent agreement for them to borrow and feed off our energy.
Contemplative and cinematic, theirs is a profound sort of rock. Being there in that pool, submerged in the rhythms pouring out of them, the band’s collective release, was nothing short of spiritual. And I’m not kidding.
It was the kind of catharsis that gives you goose bumps, a sort of sound-inspired full-body chill that lasted nearly every second of their set.
We all just sat there, some of us bobbing our feet and heads to the beat, others just watching. You could’ve just as easily wept as jolted up in raucous celebration. It was that personal, and don’t ask me to explain why.
Something in the air, maybe. A bittersweet baptism in a hollowed pool suddenly brimming with ripples of color and light.
It was just one of those things.
The key about Explosions in the Sky is their music is deceptively simple. The drumming, the bass lines, the sweeping guitars—none of it reinvents the wheel. But it’s able to strike at an emotional chord somehow, through repetition and the layering of two, sometimes three competing guitars—one establishing mood while the others pluck over it, decorating the vistas this band creates with notes of what I might imagine memory sounds like.
They write about moments in time. “First Breath After Coma,” “The Only Moment We Were Alone,” “Your Hand in Mine”—these are a few of the titles on my favorite of their records, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. By focusing on such isolated incidents, they capture an entire history—a story of love, loss, redemption… everything.
More than rock stars, these guys are painters. It’s just their tools make noise.
By the end of the night, our cool little makeshift venue had grown grandiose. The walls, the ceiling, everything was giant now, textured in the 100-plus years it had been on this planet—in my home state, just 25 minutes from where I grew up.
So much must have happened there over all that time.
So much sound. So much energy. So much we’ll never truly know.
Listen/Watch:
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 2:32 pm and is filed under cd reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
