Happy 20th Anniversary to Explosions In The Sky’s debut album How Strange, Innocence, originally released January 17, 2000.
When we talk about challenging music, we often talk about complexity or dissonance. Something might be hard to listen to or appreciate at first glance because it doesn’t get our toes tapping or it contains sounds that make us uncomfortable. Abrasion. Acquired tastes. The sort of thing that you need to get to know, that rewards repeated listens, is what we’re usually talking about.
How Strange, Innocence, the debut album by Explosions In The Sky, is challenging in a different way. At first brush, it isn’t too opaque. Over the faint whirring of helicopter blades, we open up on Michael James’ quiet, simple bassline, supplemented with some quiet snare hits and an acoustic guitar fingerpicking. A lead guitar plays the same short melody, repeating, over the top. It is quiet, it is nice. ‘I could listen to this for quite a long time,’ you think.
This theme goes on and on and on. The guitar lead changes from time to time, but the mood remains completely stable for three minutes—you’ve probably spaced out by now—before the band pivots to a prototype of the climaxes that they perfected on later works like The Earth Is Not A Cold, Dead Place (2003). After “A Song For Our Fathers,” you see that this glacial approach is not limited to the first track—it defines the album.
No, How, Strange Innocence is not difficult to hear at first, but it is difficult to keep hearing, to really focus in on, to pay attention to. Its peacefulness threatens to fade into the background. It asks for patience, the sort of thing that was hard to ask for at the turn of the century, with pop culture fixated on the likes of Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys. But it is even harder to ask for in 2020’s attention economy. It isn’t really classical minimalism, but it is a riff on the concept that confronts popular music’s obsession with motion.
Which is not to say that Explosions In The Sky, or even How Strange, Innocence, is a musical island. The likes of Labradford and Do Make Say Think and many of their post-rock brethren also constructed brilliant studies in stillness near the end of the millennium. What How Strange, Innocence does so well is make productive use of white space and familiar instruments—guitars, drums and bass—to evoke otherworldly soundscapes that sound familiar upon first listen, but carry so much depth on further investigation.
Grab a pair of good headphones and zero in on the first five minutes of the appropriately titled “Time Stops.” Out of the right channel you’ll hear an acoustic guitar, patiently picking at a series of two-note patterns, with an electric guitar whirring away through monotone eighth notes. Sometimes the intervals change, sometimes the pitch of the electric guitar changes, and sometimes (rarely) a rhythm changes. But things stay largely the same until we add a drone around the three minute mark and the electric guitar takes up a more melodic line. This is bold stuff—asking a listener to pay attention to all of the small shifts and construct meaning without the help of lyrics.
When I hear “Time Stops,” I hear the acoustic guitar as an inner peace that everyone wants. It’s simple, it’s pleasant, it’s something you can come home to at the end of a long day. But then the constant electric guitar is all of the thoughts that preoccupy us: the work that still needs to be done, that friend we’re worried about, our nervousness about the state of our society, the phone call we really, really should make but are too scared to.
The song is telling us, at least I think, that we’re always going to be beholden to these two things: we’ll always crave that inner peace but the whirring of the electric guitar will be there—at least until we get to the second half of the song and chaos starts to unfold. The chaos is satisfying, somehow, although it does not bode well for our gravitation toward that inner peace. We can’t make out that acoustic guitar, if it’s even there anymore. The song fades out, suggesting that this manic state is permanent.
Of course, this is not the “right” interpretation of the song, but that’s not really the point. The point is that I only concocted this reading of the song in relistening to the record to write this piece. Because I’ll admit that I am usually doing something else while this album is on. I am cleaning my house, or working, or reading a book late at night. Historically, I have not given the work the patience that it demands.
Sure, the climaxes are exciting and the music has that strange cinematic quality that makes you feel like whatever you are doing at the moment (like housecleaning) is the most important thing in the world. But How Strange, Innocence is not background noise. Its beauty and wordlessness make us want to keep it in the background, but we must resist this temptation. There is so much here to uncover, if only we can pay attention.
It’s rare that a piece of music asks so much of us. Unlike atonal jazz, death metal, or other acquired tastes, How Strange, Innocence asks us to overcome not our natural inclinations and tastes, but something much more everyday and much more nefarious: our complacency.
LISTEN: