Explosions In The Sky, All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone

While Explosions in the Sky does notoriously work very slowly (they scrapped six months 'worth of songs before going into the studio for All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone), they were busy in the four years since 2003's The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. In 2004 they wrote and recorded music for the movie Friday Night Lights and toured much of the year; in 2005 they went into the studio for a few weeks to record their entry in Temporary Residence's excellent Travels in Constants series.

Perhaps because Explosions were so busy, All of a Sudden isn't the reinvention of the post-rock wheel that some of the band's fans had hoped for. (The group's major new wrinkle here is the addition of a piano.) But it is more complex, a welcome change from the set-’em-up, knock-’em-down affairs that have made previous EITS albums exercises in diminishing returns. Here, the songs meander, moving through myriad parts on their way to their inevitable, um, explosions instead of crudely going for the jugular. In so doing, they set themselves apart from a rapidly growing subgenre of Godspeed You! Black Emperor devotees whose imaginations begin and end with “loud” and “soft.”

In a way, it's useless to talk about individual tracks from an EITS album — the group famously plays forty-minute live shows with no breaks, constructing new interstitial material to string the songs together each time they perform — but the obvious standout is the 13-minute “It's Natural to Be Afraid.” Composed of three parts, the song helps properly end the previous track with a somber piano, guitar and noise trio, proffers a classic EITS crescendo in its middle section and ends with a whimpering Ebow-meets-treated-piano coda.

Still all-instrumental, still as emo as anything you'd find on a Fall Out Boy album and still relentlessly lyrical and melodic, All of a Sudden is everything you want in an Explosions in the Sky album. Lucky for us, they've given us even more than usual to digest. Treasure it.