Explosions In the Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (2011) [Temporary Residence] // Grade: B

It’s been four years since the most accessible purveyors of the almighty post rock sound, Explosions in the Sky released any new music. The 11-year-old sound is still very much their own; immediately recognizable and intricate and it takes but minutes before the player’s guitars release great potential from string necks, allowing opener “Last Known Surroundings” to really reach, like some soaring Hermes above. Though it’s been their longest time between albums, it’s still very much a sound that we’re used to from these Austin boys. Following 2007’s All of a Sudden, I Miss Everyone, a record that took a pair of years to lay to tape, the band are taking an obvious route in letting Take Care, Take Care, Take Care function as a welcoming party for their listeners that might not have yet grown tired of the known post rock release. Whereas a variety of instrumental offerings usually find benefit in supporting and fostering, rather than purporting something to their listener, Explosions in The Sky are making sure that their thematic, sonic and visual elements aren’t at all lost in the drifting, quiet-loud-quiet celestial shuffle.

Getting past the homecoming nature of Take Care isn’t easy, as pieces of the six-song album’s most blunt imagery is supporting the idea with open arms: the artwork, a painting of a vine-overgrown entryway where mail is stuffed into an adjacent box, is quite the frank visual of what any natural return might look like. There’s also the opener track’s title (the aforementioned “Last Known Surroundings”) as a reminder of where they were, back at “All of a Sudden,” land. The band has stated that going immediately after ones’ emotions is key to their efforts and with Take Care, like previous releases, they do just that. Whereas the first song functions as a comfortable 3-minute foyer, it’s the album’s second offering, the slow-growing and coda-exploding, “Human Qualities,” that finds the band leaning more heavily on what they can do with space, silence and delicacy over the usual ballooning flutter-and-march combo to come up with something that pleases not just your ears but instead, plays with your sonic, visual and sensory receptors all at once. In the song’s mid-section, it nearly gets silent and headphones present themselves as a listener’s only resort. Once affixed, the song reveals its own titular, lifelike quality- a heartbeat, three quick thuds a few times over before the frail guitar returns, to bring the song back to life. Sure, it’s the band acting far too plainly after representation, but by now, Explosions in the Sky have likely earned that right a few times over.

A favorite here is “Trembling Hands,” a song that succeeds in functioning to remember how this band not only inspired acts of the pondering instrumental world, but also that of sharp-dressed post punk citers like Interpol, who you can’t help but think of once the song’s halfway mark hits. As mentioned, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care is full of much the same type of Explosions in the Sky’s pantheon-ruling genre’s enduring principles of listener anticipation, sustained delicacy and instrumental command and once these six songs are finished, the release feels very much like the sort of record we have just come to expect from the band. In the last decade, the group has rode from Austin unknowns to motion-picture soundtrackers and though a lot has changed in their genre since they started— or even since they last released material— the band have done so all on a sound they remained very much wedged under, supporting and exploring just enough over each album to continue a forward progression.

- The Holloweyed