This past summer, I bought Explosions in the Sky’s 2003 album The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place on vinyl. I’d heard about the band and had listened to “Your Hand In Mine,” the album’s most popular song, but I hadn’t experienced the album in its entirety. Listening to the full record on vinyl in one sitting was one of the most beautiful music experiences I’ve ever had, and it’s since become one of my all-time favorite albums.
The Austin, TX-based quartet does not have a vocalist nor lyrics of any kind in their songs. This may sound weird or risky, but it makes for some amazing, emotive pieces of music. They also composed the soundtrack for everyone’s favorite high school football TV drama, Friday Night Lights.
Where Cold Dead Place and their other albums were loud, expansive and ridden with crescendos, their new album, The Wilderness, is claustrophobic and anxious. It’s more experimental than their past albums, signaling signs of a departure from their signature sound. Even moreso, all the songs on The Wilderness are between two and seven minutes long, a break from the full-scale 10-minute ballads on their past work.
This works to the group’s advantage because the band doesn’t just create songs; they create moments. And, because The Wilderness is the band’s longest album in terms of number of tracks, this enables the listeners to create many different experiences for themselves. One song, “Logic of a Dream,” feels like an amalgamation of multiple dreams crashing into one. It starts out simple enough, but morphs into a heavy, distorted nightmare. As the drums roll in, it gets more distorted until it drops off into a plane of nice, easy melodies.
Songs like this are what fills up The Wilderness. Each one takes you on a miniature journey through Explosions in the Sky’s soundscape. This album is quiet but detailed, allowing the listener to fill in the blank spaces with imagery of their own. It might be frightening or uncomfortable but it’s calming all the same. It forces the listeners to challenge themselves with how to interpret the album and how to listen to it. You can’t listen to the songs disparately. Instead, turn it on and let experience the album for what it is. Let it engulf you and wash over you until all you want is to experience it all over again.
In an interview with NPR Music, guitarist Munaf Rayani said: “The album eventually became about… the search for something: something new, something different, something inside yourself, something outside yourself.” As you listen to the album, this becomes undeniably true. You start searching for the minuscule details, the meaning behind arrangements, the context within the songs’ titles. Not only that, you start searching for how the songs and the album as a whole speaks to you on a personal level. As you search through The Wilderness, you end up searching through your own wilderness.
Listen to “Logic of a Dream” from The Wilderness below.