Explosions In The Sky – Take care, take care, take care

text: Alex Gavin

Hailing from the Lone Star State, an American destination known for all things “big,” Explosions in the Sky has a penchant for the epic. With each sustain-drenched note of their now six-album discography, the band has built a formidable rock empire by crafting wide-open, lyricless soundscapes that bend and swell at an ethereal hum. They are masters of this niche of noise rock, and after more than a decade, they’ve been able to cement their credibility as genuine craftsmen rather than common noisemakers.

The band’s latest release, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, which has been on the scene for a little more than a year now, is a testament to this evolution. The album is getting its due diligence with a second round of touring, and Explosions is set to mindfuck an audience near you throughout the course of the summer (with particular emphasis on June 26 at the Chicago Theater).

Seriously get your tickets now. This will be a sold-out tour.

At their very best, Explosions in the Sky is able to drive listeners to a moment of catharsis, and Take Care evenly spreads these pockets of sonic “aha” throughout the six-track offering. It listens as a complete thought and, compared to their previous work, is remarkably coherent from cut to cut. There are a lot of aspirational qualities to the album as a whole, and even though they abstain from any lyrical content, a slant of optimism seems to dwell throughout Take Care. But then again, maybe that’s just me.

That is the inherent beauty of bands like Explosions in the Sky; you make of it what you will and take comfort in knowing that there is no right answer. Take Care is more of a soundboard, a place to bounce your thoughts and musings to see what eventually sticks. Meaning is situational. On a sunny day, it’s one album, but on a backdrop of rain clouds, it’s another. And this isn’t singular to Take Care; Explosions’ body of work is a canvas to fill from the safety of your headphones.

While some may claim this adaptation of meaning is true for any band or song, with Explosions in the Sky, the phenomenon takes on a life of its own. Budding builds give way to open-handed smacks of cymbals and distortion, and just when you’re caught up in the chaos of it all, they take it down to a nimble buzz. There is no scientific method to their approach, and the only constant of their craft is a piled layer of sound. Subsequent listens yield new licks of EBow, floods of reverb and delicate interplay between lead guitars.

The intricacies of their work are not lost in a live setting, and if anything, they are able to expand upon the sources of controlled mayhem from each album. Noise rock is characteristically volatile in its nature, but the boys of Explosions take these compositional elements to unimaginable highs in a live setting. Check it out for yourself in the video below, and if you have any sense of anything, get your ass to their next show.