EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY

How Strange, Innocence TEMpORaRY RESIdEnCE Texan post-rockers’ under-the-radar first flight reissued on vinyl.

Some special extra ingredient is essential to make purely instrumental music work in a band context, and Austin’s Explosions In The Sky hit their own magic seam immediately when they recorded How Strange, Innocence as teenagers in 1999, releasing 300 CDrs on a friend’s Sad Loud America label before signing to Temporary Residence.

Named after witnessing a fireworks display the night they recorded their first track, their sound and mission was born fully-formed when guitarists

Munaf Rayani, Mark Smith and Michael James (doubling on bass), plus drummer Chris Hrasky embarked on the self-described “cathartic mini symphonies” captured on the debut recorded over two days in January 2000. Reissued again on vinyl in triple gatefold sleeve to mark its near-20th anniversary, the album shows a band with nothing to prove or follow-up, unhampered by verses or choruses as they explore the infinite possibilities of letting their instrumental telepathy fly.

EITS’ early power lay in fearless whisper-to-a-scream dynamics that could see soaring guitar blizzards rear suddenly after minutes of intricate, pindrop chamber interplay on tracks such as Snow And Lights, Look Into

The Air or Magic Hours, where the tension builds endlessly before its skyrocketing finale. This beautifully-wielded pressure-cooker ethos reaches its apotheosis on Glittering Blackness, climbing from glistening poignancy to crashing, oceanic heave in just five minutes, then the 10-minute Time Stops, where bowed cello melancholy mushrooms into a skyscraping firewall. The album ends with the sonorous reflection of Remember Me As A Time Of Day, the song they recorded that night of the fireworks.

As shown by 2005’s also-reissued

The Rescue (previously only sold at gigs), EITS went on to hone, expand and refine this basic template over six more albums (and four soundtracks), their music gracing anything from mountain documentaries to Power Rangers.

How Strange, Innocence reached for the stars, though, and still entrances.