When Texas band Explosions in the Sky offers to play a one-off benefit concert, you can bet your life that, true to the band’s name, a spectacle will follow. On a recent Monday evening, Explosions lived up to expectations with a stunning hour-and-fifteen-minute-long performance to aid Jeff Jacobs, the trumpeter of opening band The Drift. Jacobs is currently fighting both cancer and insurmountable medical bills.
To call the show “explosive” is no small statement, given the band’s origins. Post-rock is a genre that is inherently easy to write off as unnecessary to experience live. Almost all bands within the genre are instrumental, and most of them rehearse so thoroughly that their live product sounds almost identical to their recorded sound. Yet for all of Explosions in the Sky’s similarities between its live performances and recorded music, the live show remains breathtaking. The three guitar/snare drum onslaught certainly mimicked the harmonies and sounds experienced on the band’s albums, but the dynamic shifts and hypnotic melodic precision provided a convincing argument that for this band at least, post rock needs to be heard live.
