Graham Reid | | <1 min read
Explosions in the Sky: catastrophe and the cure
Billy Bob Thornton has made some pretty bad movies, but among his best is Friday Night Lights in which he played a football coach at a small town in Texas. It is a wonderful movie full of small telling detail about dreams, promise denied and the expectation a small town places on its college football team. Thornton is a man under pressure as much as his players.
The film also boasts beautiful cinematography and gorgeous incidental music by this appropriately named band.
Their instrumental, mostly guitar-based, music has sonic breadth and a widescreen quality -- it feels as big as the landscape of West Texas -- but is also full of simple but melodic detail. It can be intense but equally, in the course of the same piece, it will pull right back and down to unexpected intimacy.
A couple of tracks here bring piano to the fore also.
The six pieces on this, their fourth album, move seamlessly into each other (you'd be forgiven thinking it was one long piece) and so the album has symphonic reach and intensity.
Very special.
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