Feature CD Review: Explosions In The Sky - All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is not so much a step backward as it is a careful sidling across the ledge of a building we wish EITS would just swan dive off of. There are moments of brutal glory recalling those that almost made us soil the backseat of our friend's Subaru in those heady early days, like on album opener "The Birth and Death of the Day". Beginning with three chords covered with a raunchy, very un-EITS distortion, repeated several times, their patented tremolo picking takes over, building up the passage briefly only to lay everything down gently in preparation for....an anthemic hook! It rears up like a rabid bronco, power chords over cymbal crashes and a galloping drum passage guaranteed to raise your heart rate. For the final two minutes of the song, we get to regain our strength as the song reverts back to more tremolo picking. "Welcome, Ghosts" is a raucous, almost military, piece with a beating kick drum heart, standard EITS fare. "It's Natural to Be Afraid" and "What Do You Go Home To?" both feature extended periods of ambient downtime, appealing but innocuous, all tinkling pianos and e-bowed droning. "Catastrophe and the Cure" returns to the tried-and-true loud-soft-loud, benefiting greatly from a distinctly more mature series of movements towards the middle of the song, before being kidnapped by the obligatory orgasmic delay-drenched crescendo. The set stumbles to a halt with the understated bookend "So Long, Lonesome", a delicate piano line becomes more insistent and pleading before giving up over twinkling guitars like sequins in strobe lights.

It is a worthy, sometimes exhausting (sometimes fruitlessly so), listen. For every transcendent moment, of which there are plenty, there is another where the leash dragging along your attention becomes taut as it almost wanders off, during some huge-yet-nondescript guitar lines. Even post-rock juggernauts, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai, always name-dropped around EITS, have struggled with overplaying their urgency (not to mention overestimating their relevancy). At the end - or "death"- of the day, the task for those, like EITS, who choose to write epic instrumentals about the sun setting or doomed sailors, is maintaining a relationship with our melodic sensibilities as well as our knee-jerk aural aesthetics and visceral predilections. Enough delay and reverb on anything can make it sound like it was imbued with magical power by elves. We'll instinctively bob our head to crunchy distortion and punchy percussion after a period of relative calm. With their most recent album, we're, unfortunately, seeing a little bit less of their flair for well-constructed and dynamic melodies, yet the same tendency for melodramatic execution. In EITS' case, these histrionics are forgivable insofar as they are hummable.