REVIEWED: Take Care, Take Care, Take Care by Explosions in the Sky
On the outset, it is pretty much business as usual for this Texan post rock quartet on their long-awaited sixth studio offering: Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. Any casual listener would be forgiven into thinking that all of their previous five studio albums has all been, technically, pretty much the same: long compositions traversing over time continuum like an outer space expedition where everything seemed majestic and breathtaking. And for a while, we were fooled into thinking the same thing as well.
Four years in making is certainly quite a long time for any 'seasoned' band to come up with a finished mastered product, but with Take Care, the end result of it pretty much explains why the long gap. Again, technically speaking, Explosions is still like how they would have sounded four years ago on All of a Sudden..., and another four before that on The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place. We're talking somewhere along the lines of familiarity here, so surely the nostalgia from the four year absence has been cured. But then; have they brought to table something new, something refreshing with this one?
To be brutally honest, we can't actually make out that much of a difference between Take Care and their last three albums (including 2005's The Rescue). They're all still filled with seven-minute-plus opus ready to blow your mind with explosions of colors (if you're under some influence); or if you're blind stinking sober, seven-minute-plus opus that is ready to bore you to death. But then you have to remember that this album takes four years in the making, so naturally it would take four years for anyone to actually get somewhere with it.
Give us another four years to (properly) make up our mind, then we'll tell you whether Take Care has been a real step up for Explosions. Read through reviews from other music critics and you'll quickly realize how almost all of them are lavishing praises on it - and that is probably because they are on a time warp or something. We're still treading our path slowly and carefully, and Take Care, while has its' magical moment, still sounds all too familiar.
Seriously: four years.
On the outset, it is pretty much business as usual for this Texan post rock quartet on their long-awaited sixth studio offering: Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. Any casual listener would be forgiven into thinking that all of their previous five studio albums has all been, technically, pretty much the same: long compositions traversing over time continuum like an outer space expedition where everything seemed majestic and breathtaking. And for a while, we were fooled into thinking the same thing as well.
Four years in making is certainly quite a long time for any 'seasoned' band to come up with a finished mastered product, but with Take Care, the end result of it pretty much explains why the long gap. Again, technically speaking, Explosions is still like how they would have sounded four years ago on All of a Sudden..., and another four before that on The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place. We're talking somewhere along the lines of familiarity here, so surely the nostalgia from the four year absence has been cured. But then; have they brought to table something new, something refreshing with this one?
To be brutally honest, we can't actually make out that much of a difference between Take Care and their last three albums (including 2005's The Rescue). They're all still filled with seven-minute-plus opus ready to blow your mind with explosions of colors (if you're under some influence); or if you're blind stinking sober, seven-minute-plus opus that is ready to bore you to death. But then you have to remember that this album takes four years in the making, so naturally it would take four years for anyone to actually get somewhere with it.
Give us another four years to (properly) make up our mind, then we'll tell you whether Take Care has been a real step up for Explosions. Read through reviews from other music critics and you'll quickly realize how almost all of them are lavishing praises on it - and that is probably because they are on a time warp or something. We're still treading our path slowly and carefully, and Take Care, while has its' magical moment, still sounds all too familiar.
Seriously: four years.
Labels: explosions in the sky
posted by Hafeez at 8:12 AM
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