Photo: Press
“You talented bastards”, bellows one inebriated Scot following the diminuendo of 13 minute masterwork ‘With Tired Eyes, Tired Minds, Tired Souls, We Slept’. Texas post-rock behemoths, Explosions in the Sky return to the UK after four years and only the majesty of The Royal Albert Hall could accommodate a show of such daunting scale and magnitude.
Road-testing their first album in four years, The Wilderness, Explosions’ work in the cinematic realm has obviously bled into the stage direction. Coupled by dramatic barriers of lights and smoke, the twinkling residue of ‘Tangle Formations’ is shattered by the climactic crashes of ‘The Birth And Death Of A Day’ cultivating to an emotional phantasmagoria.
Explosions’ live set electrifies the air with vibrant simulations that vary from the glistening loneliness of an abandoned deep sea diver to the oblivion of being strapped to a comet burning up in the stratosphere. The 5,000 strong crowd are agents of their own interpretation - that’s the beauty of the experience. A non-stop 90 minute performance with no caveats, song titles or respites. Intermittent applause punctuated the rare lulls.
Whispers of criticisms wafted through the stalls, speculating on the ‘noise factor’ of the evening. But any machine can make dissonance, it takes a collective human touch to mould it into something atmospheric, something worth caring about. Explosions’ broad strokes of splintering distortion are almost always undercut by twinkling melodies; it takes the right ear and enough patience to uncover them.
Rarely straying from the new material, Explosions set themselves for an uphill battle and, yet, conquered with incomparable grace. Guitars ricocheted off one another superposing to create a soundtrack larger than life and even larger than one of London’s most grandiose venues. Not bad for a band who have never written a chorus...
