Screw Friday, this album is perfect for any night.

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

[4/5] Back in the day, if you listened to instrumental acts like Vangelis, Tangerine Dream or Mike Oldfield, you were either someone that got Heavy Metal magazine delivered to the house, a hash head or worse, some combination of the two. Thankfully, instrumental music has beaten its way out of the burnout niche and into mainstream focus, thanks to bands like Explosions In The Sky. Haven't heard of them? You've probably already heard them without knowing-they composed the soundtrack for the 2004 film Friday Night Lights and contributed tracks to the subsequent NBC series. All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone marks a turn for the Austin, Texas, quartet into a more cohesive and less frantic state then 2003's The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place saw them, while still holding to their patented expressionist formula. From coming-to-a-boil crescendos ("It's Natural To Be Afraid") to a massaging waterfall of keys a la Moby's "God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters" ("What Do You Go Home To?"), Explosions In The Sky wrestle down the lightning-spirit of loneliness, yearning and hope and cram it onto tape-adding generous helpings of delay and reverb for good measure along the way. (TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD.) Casey Lynch

ROCKS LIKE:
Mogwai's Mr. Beast
Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!
Sigur Rós' Takk...

IN-STORE SESSION with drummer CHRIS HRASKY

Do you feel like instrumental bands are becoming more popular?
I don't know; each one of our records is selling more than the last one. One thing I've noticed over the last few years at shows or getting e-mails, there seems to be a lot more younger kids into it. I feel like you're doing something right if you appeal to teenagers.

Your last proper record scanned something like 55,000 copies. Is that where you want to hit, or do you want to sell more?
Sure, it's always nice to sell records, but I don't think we ever thought we'd get to this point. If I had a preference, I'd like to sell more records; if we stay the same, I'd be happy. If we sell less, I'd be bummed.

What does that say about the market for this kind of music?
Well, there are at least 55,000 people willing to buy an instrumental rock record. For some reason or another, there's a reasonable amount of people interested in this kind of music. I don't think we'll get to the point where we're selling a million copies, or even 100,000.

Did you initially set out to be instrumental, or could none of you sing? One of the guys in the band, Michael [James, bassist], is an amazing singer, so no. I think the stuff we were listening to at the time, like Dirty Three and Mogwai, had a big influence on us. We liked the idea of a band who didn't have a frontman. If we did, I think we'd just be some band from Austin nobody knows about.

Since you don't have a singer, who gets more chicks?
I don't know, I'll leave that up to the other guys. I'm in a relationship and one of us is married. We tend to run away after shows-we're hermits. We're pretty boring and kind of lame guys to be in a rock band.

When you perform, are you chatty with the audience since there's no singing during your set?
We'll come out and maybe one of us will say hello, but we'll just play pretty much without stopping. There're really no breaks. We'll have some sort of transition part that will segue into the next song, so there's never silence, but we've pretty much banned banter.

Why?
I find that very rarely do you find any good banter coming from bands, so we figured we weren't up to the challenge. -Casey Lynch


Official Website: http://www.temporaryresidence.com