Dude. Do you think hummus would go good on a ritz cracker?

Okay. Someone forgot to send me the memo about this. Apparently Explosions In The Sky decided to record an album without telling me. The decided to forego all prior riff planning and to not stop in the middle to finnigle this and finnigle that. Sounds like it could be a disaster right? hmmm... well when you've got the chops and the handsomeness of this band I don't know if you can really come up with something thats not death-defyingly pretty like their last few albums.

Anyway, this E.P. called "The Rescue" came out in 2005 and is an attempt by the band to prove that they sometimes umm... suck? I don't think they were very successful at it. The worst of the album sounds like Sigur Ros at their most meandering on Takk or ... well pretty much any Sigur Ros track ever. Most of the ka-ka is pretty forgiveable too because they admit to coming into the album as an experiment and not as a real studio album, let alone a plain and simple and clean artistic statement.

Actually, I find the experiment quite refreshing from a band that has a tendency to sound frigid and ... falsely icelandic. Still, there is sometimes not very much room to breathe from the gorgeous imagery and snowy landscapes that each song depicts even when their initial mission statement for a song is to have it sound like "A fast rock song, maybe with a punk rock beat."

It really makes me wonder about EITS's ability to create music that doesn't sound like reeeeeally reeeeally slowed down versions of Don Caballero. Its pretty and pretty and pretty, all the time pretty, but nothing has really captured the fire and grit of their second album for me. Even though Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die dot dot dot has some real duds, I enjoyed the growling it had underlying and threatening each song's structure.

Don't expect any growling on this; it's mostly purring. It's great, but someone forgot that they were recording every song in a cathedral on top of a mountain in the snow with bunnies made out of cotton balls pasted to reverb pedals. It starts to kinda all sound the same.

Eat a damn quesadilla dudes, you're from Austin, not Reykjavik. Also, where can I get a damn copy because its damn good. Oh, you're not selling it at anywhere but shows these days? Count me in then.

Day 1

Day 2

Also this: new album Feb 20th, 2007 called "All Of a Sudden I Miss Everyone" and they'll be playing in Brooklyn on 2/19/07. Expect to see me at that show picking up a copy of the new one and the EP because I need new stuff to smoke pot to and say shit like "dude, why is this song so long?"

(props to Liz Hall)