Day 6

Song: 06day6
Artist: Explosions in the Sky
Source: Download!

The other day, a friend of mine sent me a link to a french site that was hosting several mp3s of live shows from Explosions in the Sky. This was pretty exciting. As I've mentioned elsewhere seeing Explosions in the Sky was one of my favorite musical experiences of 2004. Needless to say, I started downloading immediately. But since EitS's songs are pretty long, there was plenty of time to poke around the site and after a few clicks I saw "nouveau titre en studio" followed by a link. Now my french is not too good, but now I was really excited and a little scared. Their last proper album, "The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place", came out in 2003 and their recorded output since then has been good but not up to the standards of either "The Earth..." or "Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever" which preceeded it. Their contribution to their label's compilation was fine but a little flat, and the music they recorded to the Friday Night Lights soundtrack was good, but having to fit their post-rock compositions to the external demands of a film's pacing rather than letting them work according to their typically looser and lengthier sensibilites limited the emotional range and impact.

So it is with relief that I say "06Day6" is a return to form. The song opens with a big reverb-ed riff played over and over again. There is a fair amount of space in the sound, like the themes that close a symphony where the entire orchestra is playing the same part over and over again. It's a little surprising, feeling like the end of something rather than the begining. (On the albums the songs often run into eachother, so this makes me curious if this song is supposed to follow something else -- "The earth..." only had 5 tracks, so perhaps this was recorded as an album closer? perhaps they have recorded more than their website would indicate?) As the riff builds and dies, a sustained note bridges into the song's second section. "06day6"'s final three minutes are a the kind of intricate guitar chorale that makes me love this band. The guitars slowly get added back into the song, the first one playing a chordal foundation, then another adds a long, sustained accompaning line and finally the third plays a more punctuated counter-melody. Each line is complementary to the others, shading the feeling created by the earlier parts and giving the song a sense of development and direction. They build until they reach the limit of the possibilities of their polyphony, and then they pull back, creating new space to build upon. The effect is somewhere between the typical start-build-fade dramatic arc of instrumental post rock and a more lyrical exploration of a feeling, with enough ambiguity to have it fit beautiful-blissed moods or beautiful-sad ones.