Happy 20th Anniversary to Explosions in the Sky’s third studio album The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, originally released November 4, 2003.
It was the first day of my new job as a teacher. I was hiding in the bathroom, full of a crazed, nervous energy. What if I say something stupid? Talk too fast? Vomit on the floor? Sensing the need to calm myself, I put on some headphones and pulled up “Your Hand In Mine.”
I wanted to hear those five guitar notes at 6:05.
I’ve been obsessed with those five notes for a long time. While 6:05 is their first appearance on the record, their arrival feels like the recapitulation of a theme. Like the last page of a perfect novel, you could not have predicted them, but once they arrive, you know they were inevitable all along. When I hear them, I feel like there is both poetry and order to the world around us, despite the confusion and chaos that I see every day. This is not an easy thing to do with five notes, but it works every time I spin this record.
If you were to put the track on now, skip ahead, and listen to those notes in isolation, they wouldn’t feel special. The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is an album that doesn’t quite believe its title until the very end. Throughout the record, emotions are mixed. For example, while “The Only Moment We Were Alone” is a stunningly patient work, with the band dropping to literal silence to re-create a tranquil moment of intimacy, it eventually roars into a coda of unfettered anger. The pounding eight-note chords eventually crash back into the original theme, as intimacy gets traded for distance, tranquility for rage. These two things become cobbled together and then suddenly the track ends at a peak, unresolved, to drop into the gloom of “Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean.”
“Six Days,” and its follow-up, “Memorial,” represent the murky depths of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, perhaps representing the Cold Dead Place that the Earth is, in fact, Not. Long stretches of these tracks feature no drums at all, and “Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean” features a free time breakdown with moments of near-silence, completely untethering the sound from the crescendos that the band is known for. As the tune comes back around, finds its footing, and attempts to rise, it lacks the grandiosity that many would associate with Explosions in the Sky. The final stretch of this song is both without control and without catharsis. It’s surprisingly short and leaves behind an empty feeling that, after a minute of drone, is finally filled in by “Memorial.”
Listen to the Album:
It's this middle stretch of the record that leads me to think that The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is not the anthem-riddled crescendo machine that the popular imagination makes it out to be. This album has a confusing reputation in post-rock circles; while most would praise the writing, production, and performances, some say that its many imitators led the genre to be saturated with crescendo-centric, longer pieces, rather than trafficking in more dynamic and unpredictable arrangements. I don’t think anyone blames Explosions in the Sky for this phenomenon, but the collective fatigue over wannabes signifies that it’s quite hard to convince people you mean it when your main message is one of hope. The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place was so ruthlessly imitated because it captured this feeling so unironically and truthfully.
What I think these imitations get wrong is the slowness and patience of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. You only get “Your Hand in Mine” if you’ve also journeyed through “Six Days” and “Memorial,” two tracks that, in their own ways, highlight the relentlessness and sometimes monotony of the noise of the world around us. This is what makes the brief moments of clarity, like those five notes at 6:05, feel meaningful.
I’m not sure that I believe the cliché that you need to have suffered in order to experience what goodness really is. But I do believe that, in the midst of suffering, a moment of goodness simply feels different—it tells you something new about the beauty of the world around you. The five notes at 6:05 are not simply beautiful; they are the answer to a question. The beauty of the album is that it pulls the question into focus just as sharply as it does with the answer.
Listen: