SPEECHLESS Explosions in the Sky
Sep 01, 2011
With a hotly-anticipated U.S. tour starting this week, the Texas instrumentalists are still making their impact without words.
BY JENNIFER KELLY
"The risk with instrumental music," says Explosions in the Sky drummer Chris Hrasky, "is that it can be background music. We want that sort of feeling that people get when they listen to a pop song."
Explosions in the Sky's fifth album, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (Temporary Residence Ltd.), is, like all the others, primarily instrumental (there are a few vocals this time). Yet at the same time, the record communicates directly with the emotions, taking listeners through a variety of moods-from anticipation to nostalgia, from joy to melancholy-all without saying a word. Hrasky and guitarist Munaf Rayani both suggest there's no easy way to capture emotion in music. Their process involves constant trial and error and a willingness to throw songs out when they don't achieve their goals.
"We kind of bang our heads against the wall for days that turn into weeks and months and years, and try and try and try to evoke these emotions that we're after," says Rayani. "There's a great amount of discussion that occurs between the four of us, but the actual achieving of the sound is remarkable to us, too. It's almost like a magician did a magic trick in front of us and we're sitting six inches away from us and can't figure out how it was done."
Or, as Hrasky puts it, "I wish there was a trick to it, because then it would be a lot easier for us. It's been four years since our last record and that's two years trying to write songs for this one, and we came up with six over two years. So there's a lot of hurling stuff away."
The Texas instrumental foursome has been working its nonverbal magic for roughly a decade now. Their first three albums earned underground respect, but the band got its biggest break in the mid-‘00s, scoring first the film Friday Night Lights and later composing music for the television show currently winding up its fifth and final season.
Three of the band's four members-Rayani, bassist/guitarist Michael James, guitarist Mark T. Smith-grew up in Midland, Texas, ground zero for the Friday Night Lights franchise. Still Rayani says he and his friends were punk-rock, skateboarding, cigarette-smoking rebels, not jocks. The guitarist's nostalgia runs more towards a five-hour road trip to Austin to see the band Propaghandi than to any state championship run.
Yet today the high, lyrical, intensely emotional guitar and percussive interplay that defines Explosions in the Sky has become closely aligned with one of television's best-loved football shows. "That's the dichotomy. That's how poetry finds itself," says Rayani. "But you know, we were going to school when that happened. We were in town. And while we didn't adhere to that side or that way of life, obviously, we were aware of it."
"Ten years later when we got asked to score the movie, it wasn't football we were scoring. We were scoring West Texas," he adds. "That's why it worked as well it did. We knew what the place looked like. We knew what the place felt like."
Still, developing a signature sound-which just happens to be your signature sound-for a popular television show has its downside. Hrasky says the show began bringing in musicians who sounded like Explosions in the Sky, rather than the band itself, by the third season. The band also fields frequent requests to record or play the show's theme song, which is, actually, not one of theirs. "It's pretty flattering when we're seeing other movies or shows or commercials or whatever where it kind of sounds like us," says Hrasky. "It's weird to think that the style of music that we play has seeped into the consciousness."
"Certainly, being involved with Friday Night Lights has been helpful for us," he continues. "It's introduced us to people who might otherwise not be into indie rock. That's kind of the awesome thing about our shows. We get everybody. I don't want to sound ridiculous, but there will be total skinny jeans, Brooklyn hipster kind of dudes and then like a jock dude and then a 60-year-old woman with her granddaughter. It's a really weird diverse mix of people, which is pretty amazing."
Even so, no one in the band seems to want to sound exactly like they did on the Friday Night Lights soundtrack forever. Working with producer John Congleton, as they have for the last three albums, they tried to make Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, sound different. They experimented with more textures and layers. There used more samples, some heavily effected, non-verbal vocals and, er, Japanese singing bowls?
"They're metal bowls, with a little wooden thing that you run along the edge," Hrasky explains. "Have you ever seen anybody play a wine glass? It's the same concept. You fill the bowls with different levels of water, and drag a little wooden stick along the edge." You can hear these bowls about two-thirds of the way through Take Care's final track, during a quiet period marked by piano chords and an indefinably ethereal sound.
Yet the core of Explosions' sound still comes from guitars and drums. Hrasky explains that each of the band's three guitar players have distinct styles and personalities-and that he could tell which one was playing blindfolded after only a couple of seconds.
"Michael is sort of the core to everything. In terms of his ability as a musician and his understanding how music should work. He's the foundation. Mark is very much about the texture and the mood of things, and then Munaf often has the anthemic, just in the air kind of melody. They can all switch off on all those roles, but I would say that's generally how I would classify them. To a huge degree, the way those three guys play together is the secret of our success. They're three interesting styles but when it comes together it's just... it really works."
Explosions in the Sky also tried to make their latest album more open-ended, so that different listeners could bring their own moods and narratives to the songs, rather than being directed.
"I definitely think that Take Care, Take Care, Take Care has a little more open space for your mind to run," says Rayani. "The beauty of instrumental music is that there are no lyrics directing you to one storyline. Instrumental music allows the mind to run and true reactions to occur, based just on true sound."
"Our goal is always to have some kind of emotional impact, to hammer home or accentuate a particular emotion or mood," concludes Hrasky. "But if I were to be critical of the stuff we've done in the past, maybe it tended to be a little bit melodramatic. This record is a little more mysterious or strange to me. I'm wondering if any of these songs would end up in some movie."
This story originally appeared in issue #10 of BLURT. Explosions' tour starts tonight (Sept. 1) in Tucson and runs through Oct. 16 in San Francisco. (Opening acts at various points will be Twin Sister, Wye Oak and The Antlers.) After that they head overseas for another European leg, followed by Australia. Dates are at their official website.
[Photo Credit: Munaf Rayani]
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