Explosions In The Sky – End (LP Vinyl) Vinyl Record

Review

For a group of instrumentalists, Explosions in the Sky have always made nakedly lyrical music. We can glean whatever clues we want from the song titles, but the Texas post-rockers' punch-the-sky guitar tremolo and lightning-bolt cymbals evoke scenery and theme more clearly than most bands' literal poetry. Since they're working with a rare gift for the dramatic, often building to rapturous crescendos, many of their tracks seem destined to score life's biggest moments—falling in love, breaking up, even dying. So it feels inevitable that they'd title an album End, using the concept of finality as a launching pad into some of their most quintessential, stirring pieces. It's been seven years since the last Explosions LP, The Wilderness, on which they took a more painterly path toward the same big-hearted vistas, weaving in electronics, strings and way more tonal variety. Some of those colors have survived. "Ten Billion People" kicks off with a scramble of ping-ponging synths, and pianos resound through a handful of epics, including "All Mountains," in which the guitars pulsate like helicopter propellers and drift gently like daffodils. These guys feel every emotion intensely—the gentle stuff is always impossibly precious, and the heavy stuff barrels you like a battering ram. And the album's ultra Hi-Fi production (take a second to appreciate that swooshing hi-hat and tumbling tom fills on "Moving On") only nudges them further into the sublime. As always, words would only clutter the catharsis.

— Ryan Reed, Relix

Product Details

End, the enigmatic new album by Explosions in the Sky, was inspired by darkness, but became a loud, dramatic, wild rumination on life and death. "Our starting point was the concept of an ending-death, or the end of a friendship or relationship. Every song comes from a story, or an idea one of us has had that we've all expanded on and made it's own world. Maybe it's our nature, but we kept feeling that the album title was ultimately open to a lot more interpretation-the end of a thing or a time can mean a stop, but it can also mean a beginning, and what happens after one thing ends might pale in comparison to what it becomes next," says the band about the album. End is perhaps the "grandest" Explosions In The Sky album - melding the quiet restraint and crushing feel of their early releases with the sonic texturing and ornate experimentation of their later releases, and their increasingly deep film and television scoring catalog, influenced by personal tastes stretching from classical to soul to experimental ambient music.