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Thanks to their melodic guitar lines and intense live shows, Texan instrumental-rockers Explosions In The Sky have carved themselves out a niche as the de-facto kings of 21st Century ‘post-rock’. Take Care… is their sixth album.
By this point in their career picking up a new Explosions In The Sky album is a lot like picking up an expanded ‘deluxe’ DVD version of some old film you used to love. It feels a little more like bonus material than it does a totally new offering. In many ways, they’re just recovering old ground - much of Take Care… sounds, in terms of melodies and song structures, remarkably similar to their 2003 classic The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. Little has changed in the sounds they coax out of their three-guitar-and-drums set up; the songs still glisten with the same bright-clean, reverb washed riffs across a back-drop of rolling snares and rising crashes.
Yet while there’s nothing surprising about the band’s new material, it’s still lovely to listen to. Few bands can make instrumental guitar music with as much emotion and nostalgia as EITS can, and that’s the reason they’ve maintain a core following for so long.
As a band they’ve essentially been doing one long victory lap for several years now, but they’re still doing it very well, and with enough conviction to make it still one that’s worth paying attention to.
