Epic Austin

Explosions in the Sky and its instrumental brethren tap Texas' sonic vastness

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN MUSIC WRITER
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

When the movie "Friday Night Lights" appeared in 2004, it was hard not to admire the pains taken to keep things authentically Texan. It was shot in Austin. Westlake High's stadium stood in for the field at Odessa's Permian High.

And an Austin band called Explosions in the Sky, made up of three Midland natives and a Midwestern transplant, provided the soundtrack. Their music cues of interlocking guitars and martial drums folded into expansive instrumental moments that captured everything gripping and heart-wrenching about football in small Texas towns.

The band — guitarists Munaf Rayani, Mark Smith, and Michael James and drummer Chris Hrasky — was already popular in certain circles, but "Friday Night Lights" introduced them to a whole new audience. (The TV version's theme song is not, as if often reported, an Explosions tune, but noted TV theme composer Snuffy Walden's take on the sound.)

As of April 2008, Explosions has sold more than 250,000 copies of its five albums, enough in this brutal music marketplace to likely ensure them a place on the roster of their label, Temporary Residence, for as long as the band is around.

All sorts of labels have been put on the music these guys make: "post-rock," "loud/soft," "post-Mogwai" (more on that later). But the adjective most often used to describe their music is "epic."

And although their sound certainly has its antecedents, it's hard to miss that their style of long, detailed rock instrumentals, a little bit indie rock, a little bit progressive rock, with their melodramatic cant and big emotion, has been a huge influence, either consciously or un-, on a generation of Austin bands.

This isn't to say acts such as the Calm Blue Sea, This Will Destroy You, Ghost of the Russian Empire, My Education, or Dikes of Holland are ripping off Explosions any more than Explosions are ripping off their forbearers. As a writer for the taste-making retailer Aquarius Records noted about Explosions, "it's not who you steal from or what you steal, it's how you make what you steal your own."

And although this sound has fans the world over, this sort of widescreen, mostly instrumental rock is practically its own Texas subgenre, as ripe for exploration and revision as countrified roots rock, Stevie Ray's blues or the one-two thrash of hardcore punk.

There's Texas in these epics.

GLASGOW ROOTS AND WEST TEXAS SUNSETS

If there's anything all of these bands have in common, it's that the 1997 album "Mogwai Young Team" is in their DNA. With its long tracks and slow builds toward massive, distorted climaxes, the Scottish quintet's debut long-player proved massively influential on a generation of rockers (just as the Pixies' dynamic shifts, the Cure's moodiness and the mythical Louisville band Slint's interlocking guitars influenced Mogwai).

Munaf Rayani sure was listening. At 27, he's the youngest member of Explosions in the Sky, but he refers to the rest of the band as "the boys." He played with Mark Smith and Michael James in bands when they were all loners in Midland, a situation made even more extreme for Rayani when Smith and James graduated from high school.

Smith started sending mix tapes to Rayani of the stuff he was listening to in college, mostly staples of '90s indie rock acts such as Pavement, Polvo and Blonde Redhead, along with Austin bands such as And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and American Analog Set. But when Mogwai songs started showing up, the effect on Rayani was altogether different.

"I was this 15-, 16-year-old boy by myself in Midland, and I'm like, 'What is this sound?'" Rayani says. He's home for a few days before a few dates in Japan, then a European jaunt. The notoriously slow-moving Explosions in the Sky is wrapping up a yearlong world tour supporting last year's "All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone."

"It seemed like classical done with electric guitars," Rayani adds. "And it wasn't like, 'OK this is the music we gotta play,' but it was music that we were really enjoying, and it just seemed amazing that this sort of music was possible."

It's a reduction to be sure, but one can almost think of Explosions as a Texas spin on what Mogwai was doing half a world away, a spin that in turn has influenced how other Austin bands sound.

"We're definitely products of the deserts of West Texas," Rayani says. "There's that vast openness that didn't offer us much other than counting down the minutes until we left, but you do have those amazing sunsets. We were lonely characters from a very lonely place, and all that stuff comes out in our music."

"I think that romantic vision of Texas is definitely present in our music," Explosions drummer Chris Hrasky says. He's the band's only non-Texas native and hails from Illinois. "We can be melodramatic and romantic at times and bands that we loved, like Trail of Dead or Lift to Experience, seem like they could only come from Texas."

As for "Friday Night Lights," Rayani says he was surprised by how well the music and film matched up. "We were the skaters and the punks and the troublemakers, but the stuff about race and class in West Texas at that time were things that we could relate to. And I think it comes back to being a product of your environment. If we're a band playing this music from Maine or Idaho, we're not scoring 'Friday Night Lights.' "

GHOSTS OF A PSYCHEDELIC EMPIRE

My Education, whose fourth album, "Bad Vibrations," is due out in June, formed the same year as Explosions and certainly share some influences. "I think we both listened to 'Young Team' a lot," founder and sole remaining original member Brian Purington says with a laugh.

But over three albums and a striking single with hip-hop artist Dalek, My Education has folded electronic music and avant-garde composition into their epic sound. They wrote a score for F.W. Murnau's 1927 silent film "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" and premiered it at the Alamo Drafthouse last March. Purington puts his sweeping, cinematic sound in a different local context, that of Roky Erikson and the Butthole Surfers. "Texas has a strong psychedelic history, and Austin has never been afraid to embrace more difficult music," he says.

Austin also never has been afraid of good-natured pretension. Witness the band Ghost of the Russian Empire, which has been around since 2005.

"I read a decent amount of Russian lit and I wanted a big dramatic name," Empire singer-songwriter Brandon Whitten says. "Russia is such a huge country and such a huge land mass. In a perfect world they should be the biggest superpower, but they've been so corrupt for so long that they can't seem to be headed in the right direction." The "ghost" bit is also a nod to our own country. "Just because you've got the biggest guns and the most stuff that you'll last forever," Whitten says.

Speaking of bigness, like many epic bands, album titles often speak to the size of the sound. Empire's new CD is called "The Mammoth." Whitten will tell you that there's more of Radiohead's populist prog in his song-craft than Mogwai or Explosions (and there's more than a little of Radiohead's Thom Yorke in his singing), but he doesn't shy away from songs that get cracking around the five minute mark. "I play the sort of stuff that I like," Whitten says. "Most of the stuff I listen to tends to be a little bit bigger and more dramatic."

The Calm Blue Sea, on the other hand, is right in the "epic" wheelhouse, from a band name that speaks to vast, open spaces to, well, a MySpace page that lists Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai, Japanese epic act Mono and French Canadian epic icons Godspeed You! Black Emperor right in the "Influences" section.

The way Explosions tweaked Mogwai's sound, the Calm Blue Sea's music tweaks Explosions', pairing a cool driftiness with meandering guitars.

"A lot of what we do definitely came from those bands," singer-guitarist Chris Patin says. "We were in bands that were more traditional rock-type bands and this was just an outlet, a chance to get together in the living room and make noise and have fun. Eventually, we got better and in April of last year we decided we should do this thing seriously."

An even newer band that moved back toward traditional song-form after a couple of years moving away from it is Dikes of Holland. A couple of members of the newly minted sextet were in Fire vs. Extinguisher, who, by the band's close last year, were blending noise and extended guitar jams as well as anyone in Austin. Where Explosions simmers, Fire vs. Extinguisher exploded. "It's definitely picking up where we left off," Dikes drummer Christopher Stephenson says. "By the end of the three years of Fire, we were wholly instrumental."

Canton calls the epic style "that big sweeping sound thing." "What we're doing right now is not quite as epic, more of a standard rock length," he says, "but I really like that big sound. You get lost in it when you go see it live. You get surrounded."

CRESCENDO AND DENOUEMENT

'Nine years, this line-up has never changed, same four guys," Rayani says. "We have nothing to cry about." In a few months, Explosions will start working on material for a new album. Hrasky says it'll probably see the light of day in late '09, but nobody should hold their breath. In the meantime, their sound has become part of the rock vernacular.

And in an unexpected twist that brings the sound full circle, Roky Erikson recently recorded a vocal for a song on Mogwai's new EP, due out on Matador Records later this spring.

"It's pretty beautiful that we are an influence on anyone, that we've put notes together that moved people," Rayani says. "It's one of the toughest things that any artist can achieve, that what you do affects anyone. That's the question any artist has to ask themselves: 'Did you strike a chord?' "

They sure did.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926