Explosions In The Sky
The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place

After the excellent, lengthy (in the title) and essential in production, "Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Die / Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever," the band from Austin (Texas) gains the attention of the public and critics with this "The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place".

We are in the post-rock universe, starting from the 2000s, canonized by the early works of Mogwai. A genre that was born as a "non-genre." In that melting pot that was the '90s, the post-rock label/soup was coined to group bands, artists, and musical scenes that actually had almost nothing in common with each other. "Few" bands, all different, which had only one tendency in common: the constant search (starting from musical legacies ranging from electronic to Hardcore) for the deconstruction of the song form. Today, post-rock has unfortunately become a real genre. A multitude of bands, "finally," all the same. For instance, if in the '90s it was hard to bridge the two coasts of the Atlantic and bands like Bark Psychosis and Slint; today the bridge over the Ocean is quickly built, from Mogwai's Scotland, one swiftly arrives at the sunny Texas of Explosions in the Sky.

Fortunately for the Texan quartet, in 2003, the market was not yet saturated with these productions, and the rule "soft intro-intermezzo noise-silence-crescendo-noise finale" was not so widespread as to endanger this beautiful record. The risk, therefore, is precisely this: inspired works that get lost in a pot of mediocrity, with musical offerings that sound repetitive like a loop. "First Breath After Coma" makes the band's project clear; the territory to explore is that of rock and the possible uses of its canonical instrumentation, Guitar - Bass - Drums. Delay becomes an expedient to make the sound even more ethereal. The explosion of the first track flows into "The Only Moment We Were Alone," with the initial phrasing making the piece a concert classic. With "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean," the band truly takes us to the bottom of the ocean, an aquatic piece. The listener is left adrift in a sea of dead calm, disrupted at the end by the usual storm. Silence returns with "Memorial," as does the "diagram" with its peaks and valleys, in the scheme "explosion - silence - explosion - silence." "Your Hand in Mine" is the worthy conclusion of a decent album that ends in total silence.

Post-rock, the inspired one, innovative in some ways, ends here, the rest is truly boredom!