I’ve mentioned my fondness for the skewed indie rock coming out of Lawrence, Kansas in the early ’90s on a few occasions, but this is the first time you’ve heard it, two good starting points are Zoom’s 1994 Helium Octipede (stream of full album!) and Panel Donor’s 1996 Surprise Bath. Those records move past the post-grunge heft that’s more typical to the region/era (e.g., Hum’s Electra 2000, Shiner’s Lula Divinia, Zoom’s eponymous debut, Love Cup’s Greefus Groinks and Sheet) to a warbling, jagged-line approach to guitar, perhaps akin to Greg Sage of the Wipers dueling with Ash Bowie from Polvo. Beyond drinking from the same water supply, the common thread between those two groups was Jeremy Sidener, the Zoom bassist who joined Panel Donor as a second guitarist prior to their sophomore release, Lobedom & Global.
Fast-forward fifteen years (some of which was spent in the Danny Pound Band with the singer of Vitreous Humor) and Jeremy Sidener is in a new band out of Lawrence, Kansas, playing bass and singing in Major Games. He’s joined by guitarist/vocalist Doug McKinney and drummer Steve Squire, formerly the guitarist/vocalist of Everest (the Kansas version, not the current Americana outfit from California), giving Lawrence historians more than enough cross-references to highlight. The sonic connections to their predecessors come via the tell-tale tremolo-bar twang of the guitar and the urgent vocal delivery of Sidener on the up-tempo tracks.
You won’t mistake EP 1 for a lost Panel Donor or Zoom album, however. The sound has been fleshed out and modernized, taking cues from shoegaze revival bands and pairing those signature leads with textural accompaniments. The vocal trade-offs between Sidener and McKinney pace EP 1 nicely; the former applies a slight dose of Devo fidgeting to his three songs, while the latter handles the slow-burning “Spools” and “Wet Talk.”
All five tracks have accrued heavy play counts at my desk and in my car over the past month, but “Wet Talk” stands out as the highlight of EP 1. Stretching past eight minutes on Sidener’s expressive, up-front bass line, “Wet Talk” grapples with a still-stinging regret. McKinney sings “They come for your time / They come for your money / They come as family / As all of your love / As all of what you love,” and it’s hard not to linger on “family” as the breaking point of this narrative/warning. It may not have the anxious energy of the Sidener-fronted tracks, but it remains compelling throughout.
Major Games’ EP 1 is both a reward for those who’ve kept Zoom and Panel Donor in their listening pile and a healthy reminder that Lawrence is not done producing memorable indie rock groups. I mentioned that you won’t mistake EP 1 for a lost Panel Donor or Zoom album, and in full disclosure, I’d still recommend it if that had been the case. But I’m much happier with the actual result, which brings a decidedly different energy to the current surplus of shoegaze-informed acts.
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Here’s a tip for all press agents sending digital one-sheets to my inbox: If you cite Fugazi, Jawbox, and Smart Went Crazy in the first line of the e-mail, I will check out the album and/or see the band live. Fugazi and Jawbox are a good start, but anybody citing Smart Went Crazy in 2011 earns my trust. It obviously helps if the band sounds like Fugazi, Jawbox, or Smart Went Crazy, but there’s only one way for me to find out, right? Even if you’re lying, I’ll appreciate the effort. Anything to keep “Animal Collective, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys” from being applied to the newest, hottest post-chillwave record.
In the case of Grass Is Green, my excitement was doubled because those references were coming from a Boston-based group. As it turns out, three-quarters of the group are transplants from Rockville, MD, a more natural locale to be weaned on Dischord’s finest, but that fact doesn’t kill the buzz. I am drawn to math-rock guitar figures and time-signature changes like a moth to the flame, and Grass Is Green offers enough of both to make me into a burnt husk on the floor.
Don’t expect a straight hybrid of the aforementioned bands. There’s a lot of Polvo/Rectangle weirdness floating around, specifically the juxtapositions between frenetic guitar interchanges and unexpected bouts of melodic pacification. Smart Went Crazy and Fugazi register for the DC reference points, but the clearest touchstone would be a twitchier take on Faraquet’s ever-shifting math-rock, and not just because Devin Ocampo mastered their first album, Yeddo. With a few welcome exceptions, Grass Is Green aren’t prone to standing still.
It’s easy to extend that tendency to the group’s output. The ten-track Yeddo was released on Bandcamp last September, followed up in March by the seven-track Chibimoon. That’s a remarkably quick turnaround for a band bartering in jagged guitar shapes. Credit the ease of digital distribution and/or an overflow of material. Fortunately, you can grab both of these albums for a whopping $10.
The distinction between Yeddo and Chibimoon is noticeable, if by no means absolute. The former has cleaner hooks and more straight-ahead momentum, the latter has sharper left turns and greater changes in pace. Yeddo is still off-kilter, but the melodies of “No Legs,” “Feeling Different,” and “Tricky Tim’s ‘Night on the Town’” ring through the knotty thicket of guitars and percussion. The aggressively antsy “Uhm Tsk” hits the raucous energy of early Les Savy Fav, and was the highlight of their set when I caught them earlier this year.
Chibimoon is better at showing its range. Opener “Slow Machine” cycles through several whiteboards worth of passages, but never tops its hooky “Drift into the magic hour” part. “Boat Show” and “Chibimoon” start off with uncharacteristic calm, but the cathartic climax of the title track is the highlight of the record. The rollicking “Tongue in Cheek” hits its stride with a drum-crazed mid-section. “Twinkle Toes” is likely as close to a slow jam as Grass Is Green will write. This split between fifth-gear discord and lilting lullabies can make your head spin.
Even within the realm of high-energy, DC-inspired math-rock, there’s an awful lot going on in both Yeddo and Chibimoon. Grass Is Green’s compositional restlessness is both a blessing and a curse, bringing in a surplus of ideas but occasionally ushering the best ones out too soon. The easiest solution would be to cherry-pick each record, grabbing some satisfyingly skewed rockers from Yeddo and the calmer and/or weirder moments from Chibimoon, but you’d inevitably miss out on memorable passages. It’s better to get both albums and work through the knots.
Special Boston-area note: Grass Is Green is on a bill with the excellent Me You Us Them, Grandfather, and Pile at Great Scott on September 1. If you miss that superb bill, you can catch them again at the Middle East Upstairs on September 29 with fuzzed-out indie rockers Young Adults.
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Imagine seeing a band play exactly the right length set. No technical problems gumming up the works. No ill-advised set-closing jam stretching past ten minutes. No padding the set lists with weaker tracks. No forced-hand encore. You leave wanting to hear the album when you get home. At a tidy 32 minutes, Austin-based We’ll Go Machete’s debut LP, Strong Drunk Hands, is the recorded equivalent of that ideal set: a half-hour of honed post-hardcore that keeps my eyes away from the clock.
We’ll Go Machete took notes from the right bands. There’s the lockstep precision and fearsome holler of Quicksand, the math-rock guitar interplay of Drive Like Jehu, the big riffs of Fireside, and the urgency of At the Drive-In. Strong Drunk Hands doesn’t reinvent the post-hardcore wheel, but if you have even a passing interest in any of those bands, you’ll marvel at the craftsmanship of “DM Barringer,” “Hayward,” and “Good Morning Munro.” I’d cite the other seven tracks too, but you get the point.
Naturally, next time I’ll want more from We’ll Go Machete. I’ll want a longer set. I’ll want an evocation of the melodies and warmth of J. Robbins’ voice. I’ll want more of that math-rock guitar interplay, which proves thoroughly effective in limited doses here. Hell, I may even want a ten-minute album-closing jam. But for now, I’m fully satiated by the precision, economy, and force of Strong Drunk Hands.
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When I first heard Implodes’ Black Earth, I assumed Kranky Records had pulled its woozy strains of droning psych-rock out of the ether. I’d listened to the record a few times before I learned that one of Implodes’ guitarist/vocalists (trust me, the guitars come before the vocals on Black Earth) is Matt Jencik, formerly of math-rock groups Hurl, Taking Pictures, Don Caballero, and Thee Speaking Canaries. Suddenly, the title of “Song for Fucking Damon II (Trap Door)” made considerably more sense, a callback to Thee Speaking Canaries’ “Song for Fucking Damon” on Life-Like Homes.
Yet this connection offers practically no illumination on the dark terrain of Black Earth, except to identify what it is not. (Guitarist/vocalist Ken Camden’s 2010 Kranky LP Lethargy & Repercussion is a somewhat closer stylistic kin.) Implodes do not engage in time-signature workouts. Five of the album’s eleven tracks eschew percussion entirely. Instead, Black Earth thrives on an evocative haze of layered guitars. Lead track “Open the Door” maps out a landscape of strummed acoustic guitar, electric echoes, and distant distortion. Black Earth is a record of guitar tones, first and foremost, and Implodes craft a range of compelling sounds throughout. Songs like “Oxblood” and “Down Time” are welcome additions to Kranky’s canon of droning guitar compositions.
That isn’t to say that Black Earth lacks tangible songwriting. “Marker” obscures its vocals to the point of unintelligibility, but its billowing riffs translate the menace. “Meadowlands” kicks off the second side with a dose of propulsive psych-rock, highlighted by haunting vocals and keyboard punctuation. Closing track “Hands on the Rail” pairs the gothic doom of its spoken vocals with some of Black Earth’s finest guitar work.
This balance between guitar drones and psych-rock maintains Black Earth’s dark, menacing atmosphere. I could wax poetic about the world Implodes creates here—a thick forest at dusk, dark arts practiced around a dying fire, animal blood marking abandoned trails—but the important point is Black Earth encourages such mental pictures. Few debut LPs, even from groups with math-rock elite in their ranks, appear so fully formed.
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Should I even use the word “reunited” in reference to Polvo anymore? Since their 2008 reformation, they’ve reworked their back catalog for live sets, released an excellent LP in 2009’s In Prism, and rather suddenly re-emerged with this single. Unlike a certain reunited band who’s remained in set-list stasis for eight years now, Polvo’s too restless to stand still.
“Heavy Detour” b/w “Anchoress” heralds the group’s as-yet untitled new album, due on Merge Records in an as-yet unannounced timeframe. The a-side, available for streaming here, splits the difference between the mid-tempo pace of Dave Brylawski’s three contributions to In Prism and the driving guitar loops of “Beggar’s Bowl.” Brylawski’s vocal melodies have improved, the energy level is up, and the presence of both sitar and electronic strings (reminiscent of Helium’s The Magic City) makes perfect sense. “Heavy Detour” bodes well for that upcoming LP.
Ash Bowie’s “Anchoress” takes a more ponderous route, exploring one of Bowie’s intractable, vaguely unsettling narratives with lyrics like “The seasons turn and she fashions a shrine / Arranging all the apples in symmetrical lines.” Lighthearted keyboards cut through the atmosphere, but the song’s keyed by its tense closing jam, which threatens to run long before a 45-enforced fade-out.
The alternate take of “Anchoress,” available as a digital download with purchase of the 7”, revisits the mid-fi production values of Polvo’s Today’s Active Lifestyles and Exploded Drawing. The noisy guitars are a welcome return to that era, especially when they recall the lurching of “When Will You Die for the Last Time in My Dreams.” While I’ve grown to appreciate the polish of In Prism and “Heavy Detour,” the grime of this alternate take of “Anchoress” fits the tone of the song better.
To return to my opening point, no, I should not use “reunited” in reference to Polvo’s post-2008 output. “Heavy Detour” b/w “Anchoress” isn’t a worthy pick-up because it’ll scratch your nostalgic itch; it’s a worthy pick-up because these two songs are excellent additions to a daunting discography. That’s past tense vs. present tense, and it’s time for more of Polvo’s reunited peers to join them (and Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr., Mission of Burma, etc.) in the latter category.
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Warning: This will be one of those “I’m not sure where he’s going with this point” reviews, so bear with me. I promise I’ll get around to discussing the new Daniel Striped Tiger album, which is well worth checking out.
One of the competency exams for my Master’s Degree in English involved reading passages from various works of literature and then naming what movement it came from, assigning a date range to it, and citing stylistic motifs to support your choices. If you knew the author and title of the work, fantastic, but the big picture was more important. For someone whose studies focused on the 20th century, differentiating between a modernist and postmodernist work was second-nature, but the fear of having to recognize a Restoration comedy kept me glued to my Norton Anthologies for a few weeks. Fortunately a Wallace Stevens poem made an appearance and allowed me to exhale.
I bring up this anecdote not to alienate the majority of my readership (although I know there are a few past or present literary scholars in my midst), but because Daniel Striped Tiger’s No Difference caused me to think of a related, if entirely hypothetical exam. Does No Difference qualify as hardcore, post-hardcore, both, or something else entirely? Tricky DC post-punk? Late ’90s screamo? I envisioned an exam in which I heard 30 seconds of one of these songs and had to place the sub-genre, choose the year range, and cite the dominant facets of the sound. I shuddered at this thought. Not only are these distinctions much more precise than the literary periods I was required to know (measured in decades rather than centuries), but their boundaries are blurred, if not outright broken.
Daniel Striped Tiger make that hypothetical test nearly impossible. Depending on which 30 second sample you got, you could present a convincing argument for any of those sub-genres/eras. Maybe you get the first 30 seconds of “Goldwood” or “Ancient Future” and chalk up its careening-off-the-rails energy and throat-shredding vocals to a well-done contemporary hardcore album. Maybe you get the loping, bass-heavy groove of “No Reverse” and place it in the mid-fi, turn-of-the millennium indie rock boat alongside North of America. Maybe you get the stop/starts of “Wait Outside” (MP3) and wonder if they’re from DC. Maybe you get one of the album’s stockpiles of gut-punching half-time riffs, let’s say the last half of “Off White,” and choose post-hardcore as your final answer. Maybe the instructor’s a total jerk and gives you the drifting feedback of “Traceroute,” lining you up for certain failure.
No Difference touches on all of these sub-genres, but Daniel Striped Tiger is too smart to stick with one for too long. The album is all about building energy, hitting that point when the train leans off the rails, then finding interesting ways to dissipate that energy. Every half-time breakdown, start/stop section, and quiet passage of instrumental interplay has two purposes: blow off the head of steam and throw more coal in the engine. They never stop moving long enough to lose the energy of hardcore or fully embrace the tightness of post-hardcore. If there’s a line between the two, Daniel Striped Tiger is sitting on it.
What makes the distinction between hardcore and post-hardcore even harder to nail down is that No Difference doesn’t follow the usual evolutionary arc from the former to the latter. Daniel Striped Tiger demonstrated both styles on 2005’s Condition and 2007’s Capital Cities. They’re simply better at it now. The riffs are bigger, the momentum’s greater, and the sense of impending collapse is higher. The lone caveat: with only eleven songs (three of which are essentially filler) spanning 26 minutes, No Difference skews much closer to a hardcore ten-inch than a double LP rock opera. I may be breathless after No Difference, but I wouldn’t mind an encore.
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According to iTunes, I have 1556 plays of The Dead Texan’s “The Struggle” logged on my iPhone. I take this statistic with a glacier of salt; that’s 143 hours of “The Struggle,” and I don’t recall going on a six-day bender with the song. But like the other inflated play counts on my iPhone,* there’s a kernel of truth buried in that glacier. “The Struggle” is a perfect hybrid of dream pop and ambient, tailor-made to play right before I drift off to sleep. Even the lyrics, delivered in a hushed duet between Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie and guest vocalist Chantal Acda, encourage such behavior, reminding that “the sun cannot last.” A thousand plays—now that’s believable.
I’ve gotten considerable mileage out of The Dead Texan’s lone 2004 eponymous album, but I’ve had to, since Adam Wiltzie and Christina Vantzou have not reconvened for a follow-up. Sleepingdog offers a reunion of sorts, especially for those drifting off to sleep with “The Struggle.” Sleepingdog started out as the solo project for Chantal Acda, but Wiltzie became an official member after mixing the 2006 debut Naked in a Clean Bed. For 2008’s Polar Life and now 2011’s With Our Heads in the Clouds and Our Hearts in the Fields, Wiltzie has provided electronic strings and background vocals. It’s always nice to find another branch of the Stars of the Lid family tree, but this one was a particularly exciting discovery.
Does Sleepingdog live up to my unreasonably expectations for “The Struggle, Part II”? Yes and no. There are moments of somnambulist bliss, but that’s not the focus here. The Dead Texan was Wiltzie’s show—no slight intended to Vantzou, whose involvement was primarily seen on the DVD of videos for each song on the album. Likewise, Sleepingdog is Chantal Acda’s show. Her songs form the basis for any further aesthetic explorations. There are stretches of With Our Heads in the Clouds and Our Hearts in the Fields when it’s just her soft voice and minimalist piano. Eight-minute-long opener “The Untitled Ballad of You and Me” takes two minutes before Wiltzie’s presence is felt, allowing Acda’s storytelling to grab hold before chill-raising strings come in and amplify the drama of the song. For the minimal pop of “It Leaves Us Silent” and “He Loved to See the World Through His Camera”, the emphasis is on nearly naked emotion, which occasionally skews sentimental singer/songwriter over ambient-classical-informed lullabies. Reset your expectations to the mesmerizing slow-core crawl of Gregor Samsa's excellent 2008 LP Rest, and you'll approach With Our Heads in the right mindset.
There are a few songs that lean closer to The Dead Texan, specifically the instrumental “Kitten Plays the Harmony Rocket” and the near-instrumental “Horse Lullaby,” the latter of which offers a “Struggle”-esque economy of lyrics. These tracks satiate my appetite for drone classical, but those aren’t the songs I go back to. Instead, I find myself revisiting the tracks like “The Untitled Ballad of You and Me” and “Scary Movie” where Acda and Wiltzie meet halfway.
The realization that Sleepingdog’s With Our Heads in the Clouds and Our Hearts in the Fields excels when Chantal Acda and Adam Wiltzie find equal footing seems obvious in hindsight. I’ve gone back to the Dead Texan’s “The Struggle” so often because it’s a rare blend of both dream pop and ambient. When With Our Hearts splits its focus, emphasizing either Acda’s straightforward musings (with the acoustic guitar duet of "From Where It Was") or Wiltzie’s drones, it loses the power of the merger. When With Our Heads hits those passages of entrancing accord, however, it's compelling enough to keep me awake a while longer.
If you're interested in acquring a copy of Sleepingdog's With Our Hearts, you'll have to import the very limited vinyl pressing from Gizeh Records.
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One of my earliest memories of a home-run band comparison was Parasol Mail Order’s catalog description of Paik’s 1998 debut album Hugo Strange as a cross between Polvo and My Bloody Valentine. Those bands were titans of my late ’90s listening habits—not that I’ve abandoned those predilections—and I watered at the mouth at the promise of a new group combining Polvo’s tunings and My Bloody Valentine’s textures. When I heard Hugo Strange, I immediately understood where the comparison came from, but also grasped that there was more to Paik’s woozy instrumentals than a genetic splicing of those two aesthetics. (This point was hammered home by Paik’s superbly sprawling 2002 LP The Orson Fader and its tidier 2006 counterpart Monster of the Absolute, both highly recommended.) If only all such tantalizing comparisons could bear such fertile fruit.
Perhaps it’s déjà vu, but more than a decade later, Me You Us Them signals the same touchstones. The specters of Polvo and My Bloody Valentine cast spells on their 2010 debut LP Post-Data. You could hear opening track “Any Time,” check the properly formatted citations of Polvo’s queasy riff-bending and My Bloody Valentine’s gossamer shine on the lead guitar, and chalk it up to a perfect hybrid. But that song’s clear vocal melodies, which culminate in an earworm of a falsetto chorus hook, break the equation. Much like Paik, the merger of My Bloody Valentine and Polvo is only a starting point for Me You Us Them.
Post-Data offers plenty of other head-turning points of comparison. “Re-Entry” starts out by pairing jet engine swooshes with “ba-ba-ba” vocal hooks, but its half-shouted chorus recalls Pinback’s more energetic moments. The chorus of “Pretty Nettles” could have slipped onto Self’s Subliminal Plastic Motives. The wistful shoegaze of “Wish You Luck” hits the sweet spot of late ’90s groups like All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors, while the loping arcs of “Drugs” mine similar terrain as contemporary acts like The Depreciation Guild. “Big Time” and “iQuit” step through the haze for urgent indie rock, complete with tricky guitar breaks. The group’s self-titled song layers guitar and keyboards over a nearly spoken-word delivery reminiscent of DC’s great Candy Machine. “As of Now” hits the cool stride of Sonic Youth. In case it’s not obvious, all of these comparisons are flattering, recalling broad swaths of my record collection.
Post-Data closes with its standout track, “Loving like Lawyers” (which they recently performed as a seven-piece, accompanied by fellow New Yorkers Appomattox). Starting out with pounding drums, then adding tremolo-heavy guitar, longing vocals, and a slippery bass line, “Lawyers” offers no obvious points of comparison, just a surplus of confident songwriting. The song head-fakes a fadeout at 2:48 before launching into a soaring, texture-laden outro. “Loving like Lawyers” acts as both a summary of what preceded it and glimpse into Me You Us Them’s possible future. (I underscore possible, since “Research,” their scream-laced contribution to a 2011 split single with Bloody Knives, is a wonderfully unexpected left-turn from the majority of Post-Data). Returning to the Paik parallel, if Post-Data is Me You Us Them’s Hugo Strange, I cannot wait for their Orson Fader, when those initial touchstones have completely vanished, leaving only own signatures behind.
Me You Us Them’s Post-Data hasn’t strayed far from my listening pile, especially in the car, since I first heard it a few months ago. That’s high praise—I will never underrate an indie rock record with intriguing riffs and compelling hooks, since those are increasingly few and far between. Perhaps that’s why Post-Data recalls so many ’90s groups; that was when I spent plenty of time with each album because my financials (and the lack of file-sharing) dictated it. Now it’s all by choice, and I’d simply prefer to hear Post-Data again. Allow me to take a mulligan and slip Post-Data onto my top albums of 2010 list.
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Has it really been twelve years since Allen Epley of The Life and Times / Shiner released new music on seven-inch vinyl? 1999 is when the superb “Semper Fi” b/w “A Sailor’s Fate” came out on DeSoto, part of a banner year for the label which also included Juno’s This Is the Way It Goes & Goes & Goes, Burning Airlines’ Mission: Control!, the Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I, and Faraquet’s “The Whole Thing Over” b/w “Call It Sane.” (Kim Coletta got a lot of my money that year.) I understand the drastic dip in interest in seven-inch singles during that span, but as I’ve noted before, Shiner excelled in the format. What I wouldn’t give for a seven-inch of the Japanese bonus tracks from The Egg (“Dirty Jazz” and “I’ll Leave Without You”) or the group’s cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow.” Seriously, I’ll probably dream about finding these items tonight.
With The Life and Times’ home studio all geared-out, it makes sense that Epley returns to trickling out a few new songs as they’re ready. Sometime later this year, The Life and Times will follow up 2009’s Tragic Boogie with their third full-length, but in the interim, they’ve issued “Day II” b/w “Day III” through Hawthorne Street Records (who’ve pressed vinyl editions of Suburban Hymns, The Magician, and Tragic Boogie). It marks the debut of the four-piece version of the group, having added Robert Culpepper Smith of Traindodge, Riddle of Steel, and Roma79 as on marimba (and keyboards, if these songs are any indication).
So how do “Day II” and “Day III” stack up with The Life and Times’ previous releases? Quite well: this single is a welcome, recommended return to (seven-inch) form. The former is an atmospheric rocker with Epley repeating “Nothing fools me” as the song shifts from a bass-heavy groove into a racing, riff-driven chorus. The latter calms things down considerably, pairing strummed acoustic guitars with woozy synth lines. The lyrics are intriguingly vague—“They said that mistakes were made / The very same mistakes we made / And history will eat itself”—fitting the song’s disorienting feel. Both of these songs rely on texture, but the strong riff of “Day II” and the lyrics of “Day III” provide stable footing.
Will these songs make the upcoming full-length? My guess is no. They stand alone nicely, perhaps acting as a bridge from Tragic Boogie to The Life and Times’ next album like Shiner’s “Sleep It Off” b/w “Half Empty” did between Lula Divinia and Starless. With any luck, The Life and Times has “Day IV” and “Day V” in the can, ready to hit colored wax in the fall after the LP’s out.
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The packaging for Explosions in the Sky’s Take Care Take Care Take Care is overwhelming. The double LP set is sheathed in a full-color slip-case displaying the ivy-choked door to their world. The hefty sleeve inside folds outward from a center panel with four wings: one side showcases the exterior of the house, the other covers the interior. If you ordered the vinyl directly from Temporary Residence Limited, you’ll have one of three sets of colored vinyl incased in weathered paper sleeves. The fourth side of the vinyl is etched with the floorboard design from the center panel. Along with the download code and a Temporary Residence catalog, you’ll find an antique-style postcard with the album’s credits. The kicker is the included poster: a nine-panel (36” x 36”) behemoth with tangled ivy/growths on one side and their muddy roots on the other that can serve as a mat for your EITS house play-set (action figures sold separately).
This packaging is thoroughly impressive, if not unprecedented. Post-rock bands have been known for going overboard on vinyl even before the recent resurgence in the format—remember the crushed penny in Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F# A# Infinity?—but now it’s a trope of the genre. Few major releases from Temporary Residence, Hydrahead, and Mylene Sheath come without a gatefold sleeve and your choice of limited-run color vinyl. And with fans eager to collect all the variants, escalating the range of available options is a fiscal necessity.
It’s tempting to remind gotta-have-’em-all collectors that records are meant to be heard (glib response: “Duh, that’s why I bought an extra copy on black vinyl!”), but this stock retort nevertheless carries a kernel of truth. There’s a thin line between artwork which perfectly complements an album and artwork that overshadows an album. As floored as I am from the thoughtfulness of Take Care’s packaging, I haven’t said anything about its musical contents yet. With 28 panels of artwork to cover, can you blame me for skimping on the details?
What I keep wondering is why Explosions in the Sky have positioned themselves at the forefront of this packaging escalation. To use their native parlance, this isn’t their first rodeo. By the numbers, they’re the most popular instrumental post-rock band, with Take Care debuting at #16 on the US charts. (In comparison, Mogwai’s Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will matched the group’s highest US chart position at #97.) This popularity is owed in large part to EITS’s soundtrack for Friday Night Lights, which gave the genre an enormous boost in visibility and ensured the use of troubled-yet-hopeful instrumental rock in television segments about high school football for years to come. In turn, that exposure made their stripped-down aesthetic (three guitars, drums, no vocals, little extraneous instrumentation) the blueprint for your town’s up-and-coming post-rock band. For a band of their stature, the packaging bundle for Take Care usually accompanies the high-priced special edition, not the standard vinyl offering.
The question remains: Why go all-out? To one-up their packaging-crazed progeny? To give their wordless compositions the context that lyrics might otherwise provide? To reward fans who’ve stuck with the group from their early shows in college-town basements to their recent headlining gig at Radio City Music Hall? To demonstrate how seriously they take all aspects of their craft? Most likely it’s as simple as their in-house (pun unintended) artist Esteban Rey coming up with a great idea for the artwork and Temporary Residency signing off on it. (Once you’ve assembled Eluvium’s Life Through Bombardment 7LP book, anything else must seem like a relief.) Regardless of the specific why—I’m sadly not a mind-reader and I haven’t found an interview with the band that dives into the packaging angle—I’m left with a hefty package that says as much, if not more, about the state of Explosions in the Sky as its musical contents.
Here’s my potentially controversial assertion: Take Care’s artwork has to make a big statement about the group’s return from a four-year layoff because its music can’t make that statement on its own. Barring a stylistic sea change, Explosions in the Sky’s aesthetic won’t offer any surprises. It’s built on simple pieces—the affecting melodies of spiraling guitar leads, quickly strummed blocks of chords, skyward arcs of feedback, martial snare rolls—and its success comes in how those pieces fit together to elicit gut-punching emotions. But you know that trick already. It was clear when their high-water mark third LP The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place came out in 2003, and if it wasn’t, the 2004 Friday Night Lights soundtrack and subsequent emergence of EITS clones working with the same raw materials killed the mystery. That’s the price of heavy exposure and widespread influence: people will expect you to change the classic formula to compensate.
Yet EITS hasn’t shown a propensity for such seismic shifts in approach. The remix CD which accompanied 2007’s All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone offered an alternate-reality version of the album with predictably mixed results (although the Jesu remix of “The Birth and Death of the Day” is essential), but outsourcing your evolution is a cheat. The most you can reasonably expect from Take Care is a nudge in a slightly different direction, like the more prominent use of piano on the 2006 EP The Rescue and their 2007 LP All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, but that’s not how earth-shaking statements of purpose are written. And for post-rock, such statements are essential for critical standing.
Like Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky views itself as a rock band, not a post-rock band, even though both groups operate within the boundaries of that subgenre. This distinction is key: rock bands can make fine-grained adjustments to their approach, like The National’s High Violet, and receive passionate acclaim, while sudden changes in course like Radiohead’s Kid A are more often met with quizzical looks if not dismissive glances. In comparison, post-rock bands are expected to evolve, since the nature of the genre is, supposedly, to keep moving forward. Having strong songwriting simply isn’t enough to offset the perceived need for change.
Is this situation fair to Explosions in the Sky? Should they have to switch to New Coke on their fifth proper LP? It’s not like they’ve flooded the market with material—prior to Take Care, they’d released fewer than 45 songs. They haven’t released anything approaching a bad record, and I sincerely doubt that they will. No, they’re not the most post- of post-rock bands, but that’s never been their appeal. It may seem out of character for a curmudgeon like me, but I feel for Explosion in the Sky’s predicament: either make a dramatic change and risk losing the essence of what you do, or maintain course and have that material be greeted with “more of the same.” It’s a familiar scenario for post-rock bands (lord knows I covered it in Mogwai Discographied), but Explosions in the Sky reached it in record time.
Let me go back to the artwork, since it provides the band’s answer to that quandary before the needle touches down on side A. The end product of all of those panels and the poster is an ivy-covered house. The mailbox is overflowing with letters, the ivy has worked its way around the bicycles, and the window and door are shut. Presumably, its occupants are cloistered within or just now returning from their journeys. When viewed from the inside, the open door and window show a distant tornado. My take-away from this artwork is that Explosions in the Sky are well aware of the dangers of the outside world—after all, they’ve previously gone through the destruction and renewal of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place and the floods of All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone—but they’ve found safe haven and comfort from those dangers. Unless you’ve bank-rolled your career on misanthropy, “comfort” rarely signifies change. So what does this artwork accomplish?
Take Care Take Care Take Care’s artwork does two key moves. It deflates the need for a grand gesture from the music contained within by being its own grand gesture, then reinforces the stability of their sound, thereby negating the expectation of a major shift. Nothing here signals a journey into the unknown. Instead, you’re promised the loving embrace of home. Even if Take Care is “more of the same,” it’s the same you want. That’s a rather miraculous reversal of expectations.
For the majority of its forty-six-minute runtime, Take Care is the same you want, provided, of course, that you want more of it. The most successful stretch of Take Care is side C, which features “Postcard from 1952” and “Let Me Back In.” These two compositions stretch out in familiar ways: lurking in quiet valleys, riding snare rolls and pounding toms through intense passages, relaying memorable melodies with intersecting guitar lines. The end results are as powerful as anything else Explosions in the Sky has recorded. The formula hasn’t changed, but it’s still paying dividends to committed investors.
Take Care does venture outside of base camp for a few reconnaissance missions. The patter of hand percussion gives depth to the muted arcs of “Human Qualities,” at least until it hits a distorted lead in the final minute. “Be Comfortable, Creature” thrives on deftly arranged strains of feedback. The biggest curveball is “Trembling Hands,” the three-and-a-half-minute advance single for the album which gets too much mileage out of an “Oh! Oh! Oh!” vocal chant. That new element overshadows a propulsive performance from drummer Chris Hrasky and an otherwise tidy condensation of their dynamic range.
That lone misstep is oddly reassuring. When you tore off the shrink wrap on Take Care Take Care Take Care’s packaging and built its house, you entered its comfort zone. Why wouldn’t the lone anomaly feel out of sync?
That’s the ultimate achievement of Take Care Take Care Take Care’s artwork. If you’ve put yourself in its context, Explosions in the Sky’s lose-lose dilemma turns into a win-win scenario. They’re rewarded for maintaining their genetic code and let off the hook for not evolving. That ruse doesn’t extend to the broader context—Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die… and The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place still reign as the band’s essential albums—but unlike those albums, this one comes with a completely awesome house to build.
Oh, you bought the album digitally? Good luck with that one, pal.
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