THE EARTH IS NOT A COLD DEAD PLACE

By the mid-2000s, post-rock was by no means a fresh or original idea, any more than (say) jazz fusion was by the middle of the 1970s or symphonic prog was by 1977. That doesn't, of course, mean that it was impossible for bands to make a good post-rock album in 2003, or even a classic one - and indeed many did. But what it did mean is that you couldn't expect to get many props simply for playing in a standard, generic post-rock mode, any more than you could expect to impress people by playing generic and uninspired Yes-ripoffs in the late 1970s: by the time The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place came out, post-rock bands - even the founding fathers of the genre - really needed some sort of unique aspect to their sound to distinguish them from their peers.

For the longest time (and in an earlier version of this review) I was one of those who didn't count Explosions In the Sky as being anything special; despite the fact that The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is supposedly a concept album about love, numerous early listens failed to make an emotional connection between me and the album, not least because at first they seem to be engaging in rote repetition of Godspeed You Black Emperor/Mogwai-inspired atmospheres without the emotional overtones. Time and experience has clearly changed me though; in particular, I now detect an underpinning of hope in the tone of these compositions which, perhaps, I previously wasn't in the mood to acknowledge. This sits sufficiently at odds with the melancholy and apocalypticism that is usually more associated with post-rock that I find myself compelled to reassess Explosions In the Sky, and find that there's more to them than met my ears at first.