How Strange, Innocence
Explosions in the Sky
48:50
Sad Loud America (2000)
Remaster by Temporary Residence (2005)
Starting this blog off with something that started off the career and millennium of one of my favourite bands. I suspect people who read my tweets are sick of me talking about this particular album, but it’s my blog, my rules, baby, awouuuuu.
The story goes that these guys came together after drummer Chris Hrasky posted a flyer asking for members to form a “sad, triumphant rock band”. It makes sense to me that he would initiate this project – his drumming holds most of their work together in wonderful fashion, though they insist songwriting is collaborative.
EITS are known for their spectacular, dazzling crescendos like First Breath After Coma or The Birth And Death Of The Day, among others. HS,I could be considered a progenitor to these achievements, but I feel that alone doesn’t do it justice. It does lack the production and meticulous precision you might expect from the genre. There’s plenty of sparse twinkling, of course, but it’s nowhere near the great expanses that subsequent releases, and indeed many other of their contemporaries’ works, seem to span. There are mishit notes. The mixing is a little rough. Sometimes things are an iota off key and it’s not clear if that’s deliberate. By the sum of its parts, it’s 4 guys playing instruments in a rock band, and not always technically well.
You’re probably now thinking, ‘He’s going to say something like, “But good music is more than the sum of its parts,” like a fucking scumbag.’ Dear reader, you are absolutely correct, and the worst is yet to come. It is, by the band’s own admission, cobbled together in 2 days, after barely half a year playing together, in a time of confusion, uncertainty, and naivety. And yet, it comes as close to echoing nature, an ever-present theme throughout their work, as anything else in their discography. It works – perhaps completely by accident, and maybe this accident is even why it works. Is the natural world not fraught with its own imperfections? Does it not suffer disharmony within itself? Is there still not a grace and beauty to a flock of the ugliest fuckin’ birds you’ve seen in your life soaring across the sky in V-formation, rotating the lead position to prevent fatigue?
Thus far I’ve spoken little about what it actually is that I like about this album, beyond “it sounds bad sometimes, and actually that’s good.” Performance aside, I think the songs are delightfully composed, and it’s frankly astounding to me they were able to put something so good together in such short a time. There’s a catharsis in the overdriven guitars and the way they’re mixed in (even if roughly) that resonates deeply with me at its most furious and its most anguished. The clean tones are fragile in a way that can both give me hope and build suspense. And, of course, the drumming is one of my favourite parts throughout the band’s 20 years – it rarely barges its way into the spotlight here, but when appropriate, gradually flickers into its own healthy flame, almost irresistible to groove to, but still keeping with the atmosphere.
On the Bandcamp page linked at the bottom, they describe themselves as having a “love/embarrassment” relationship with How Strange, Innocence. If any of you fellas end up reading this and wanna have a trawl through my memories hit me up because I would love for this to be something in my life I felt embarrassed about. Let me tell you that what you may consider regrettable weaknesses, I consider a fortuitous strength.
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