Review Summary: I’m not afraid to disappear, the billboard said “the end is near”
All indications are that
End is NOT Explosions in the Sky’s final album, despite the title. It still seems like a fitting name, though. At this point in the band’s trajectory, releases are infrequent (they released the
Big Bend OST in 2021, but it’s been seven years since their previous LP), and the group’s relevance, once quite prominent within the musical underground, is steadily dwindling away.
With apologies to T. S. Eliot, some things end with a bang, some with a whimper, and some with whatever the *** happened to the crescendo-core wing of the burgeoning 2000s-era post-rock juggernaut. Sure, the influence of post-rock is felt today throughout a whole swath of musical styles, but the genre itself is scarcely to be found, its bubble burst, leaving a few survivors wandering the wreckage. On rare occasions, one of these scions will strike sonic gold (I’m personally partial to Oh Hiroshima’s 2022 record
Myriad, for example), but the majority of the masses who once ate this stuff up now seem to have better places to be. In this state of affairs, Explosions in the Sky stand out like a sore thumb - still a pretty big name, sure, but it’s hard to say where they’re supposed to go from here.
It’s not like this whole situation is really the band’s fault, per se. Explosions in the Sky might not deserve a chiseled spot on the post-rock Mount Rushmore a la Sigur Ros or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but they are (were?) pretty great - pumping out some of the genre’s prettiest tunes and charming enough hearts to inspire a ton of imitators. It’s this host of imitators, perhaps most of all, who brought catastrophe upon the genre, their bland over-saturation of the market leading to the striking down of twinkly instrumental post-rock much like the dwarves of Moria delving too deep led to the devastation of the Balrog. To be fair, Explosions in the Sky didn’t exactly do their part to forestall this decline either, given a losing struggle to replicate the high quality of
The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, but the band’s 2016 effort
The Wilderness demonstrated a notable increase in musical variety, rejecting the naysayers who argued that the group could only do one thing well. Indeed, it proved to be one of their finer albums, but the timing was wrong, with the LP remaining under-appreciated, when ten years before it would likely have been a monumental release.
Now, we’re seven years later. Is
End a spiritual successor to
The Wilderness, with a (relatively) strong sense of experimentation? Or is it an attempt to replay the greatest hits when much of the audience has already moved on? To some degree, both, but sadly more the latter. There are some surprising moments to be found here - opener “Ten Billion People” begins in a manner intriguingly suggesting a shift in direction both towards folk and electronic, while “Peace or Quiet” wakes the listener up with some heavy riffage, but most of this album’s seven songs comfortably fit into what you might think of as standard Explosions in the Sky fare. They’re enjoyable enough, and, in the right mood, can be rather emotionally stirring along the lines of the band’s previous work (the album’s seeming focus on the subject of death comes through, if only tenuously), but ultimately feel totally inessential given this is an Explosions in the Sky album in the year of our lord 2023, eclipsed by similar works from long ago.
So yeah,
End is a
good album. If you happen to be stranded on a desert island, and a billionaire stops by on his yacht and refuses to give you a ride but instead offers you a turntable system with
only this record, I’d advise you to take it - there’s considerable musical beauty to comfort you as you presumably slowly die from some combination of starvation and a lack of human connection. Even in the real world, with streaming services and tens of thousands of albums at your fingertips,
End is better than passable - I’ve heard far worse even in its genre. But, as things are, this record feels redundant. Explosions in the Sky, at this stage of their careers, need to give us a whole lot more in order to really deliver. Maybe that’s not fair, but let me tell ya somethin’, kid: life ain’t always fair.
