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.