For Explosions in the Sky drummer Chris Hrasky, the most exciting moment of 2006 belonged in a zoo - or at least in some B-grade Samuel L. Jackson flick.

“Attacked by a snake! That would be the big crazy event of 2006,” reports Hrasky from his Austin home. In October, while the band was recording their new album at the storied, secluded Pachyderm Studios (birthplace of Nirvana’s In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, among others), they came across an unwanted reptilian visitor in the studio’s guesthouse one night.

“We tried to get it out of the house,” recalls Hrasky, who finally resorted to killing the intruder. Pachyderm is “just kind of out in the woods,” he says, and the house’s owner couldn’t get over to the property to personally deal with the situation. Maybe it’s another entry for Pachyderm’s guestbook, which already boasts a healthy collection of ghost stories in addition to its prestigious artists’ roster - a spooky pedigree that befits EitS’s darkly epic compositions.

Formed in 1999 and originally known as Breaker Morant, Hrasky and his bandmates - guitarists Munaf Rayani and Mark Smith, along with bassist/guitarist Michael James - got their start in Austin’s fertile music scene.

The quartet quickly gained a local reputation for their scathingly loud live sets, sparking the ire of several local club sound technicians and the admiration of fans and several area bands, including American Analog Set and …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead. In a story custom-built for indie rock storybooks, American Analog Set hooked EitS up with a record deal when they passed along EitS’s CD-ROM demo to their label, Temporary Residence Limited, with a note reading, “This totally fucking destroys.”

The band received a brief bout of national media attention shortly after the release of their second album, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever, when some news outlets erroneously reported that the record was released on September 10, 2001 (it was actually released in August). The band’s provocative name, the album cover art depicting an airplane, and the inside liner notes that read “This plane will crash tomorrow” temporarily gave EitS a moment of infamy.

The band’s more recent (and more positive) national exposure came through their role in scoring Friday Night Lights, the 2004 major-studio drama about high school football culture in small-town Texas. It is a match that sounds dubious at best – the Austin music scene (as well as a majority of indie rock bands) has largely evolved against the grain of conventional Texas (and, by extension, typical mainstream America), and the thought of EitS’s moody instrumental swells pitted against grainy shots of sweaty jocks running drills is difficult to digest.

Adding to this unusual pairing, NBC’s spinoff television series of the same name also features songs from the band’s 2003 release, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.

The film’s music supervisor, Brian Reitzell, was responsible for bringing Air and Phoenix’s dreamy soundscapes to Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation. After he approached EitS, the band realized they had a personal connection to the gridiron story.

“We wanted this record to be more terrifying to listen to.” - Chris Hrasky

“It was a book all four of us had read - the other three guys all grew up in the town where the story was based,” says Hrasky, referring to H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, the book basis for the film.

“It’s about people in Odessa, Texas, and [football] is sort of the only thing they cling to. Guys who play football, they’re also human beings. The tragedy of ex-football heroes - it’s a story that we all find kind of interesting.”

Despite the initial incongruity between the band and the film’s subject matter, EitS’s slow, climactic builds and escalating walls of sound create an ideal aural backdrop for the game-day emotional roller coasters that are depicted on the football field.

“We were really happy with the way the movie turned out,” Hrasky says.

Back in the post-Pachyderm world, Hrasky is busy trying to calm down his dog, Willis, who seems to be barking at half of Austin. The snake incident capped nearly two weeks of recording sessions for EitS’s fourth full-length album, All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone. Arguably the band’s strongest and most dynamic work to date, the album is comprised of the usual six tracks, each its own miniature epic.

“This is our favorite record of any that we’ve done,” Hrasky declares. “It’s the first one that, when we were done mixing it, I could listen to and be really happy with it,” he says, noting that Pachyderm’s isolated location in private parkland about forty miles south of Minneapolis-St. Paul may have been a positive influence.

“I think we’re going to try to keep recording at studios [in] out-of-the-way [locations].”

The chilly midwestern landscape and backwoods setting apparently provided just the right amount of creative inspiration for the band to record, a process, Hrasky acknowledges, that the bands dislikes greatly.

“I hate it,” he says. “I can’t stand recording. It’s just very nerve-racking.”

It’s also a process further complicated by the band’s predilection for long songs and for recording entire live takes.

“You get four minutes into a song and you still have six minutes left…you have to play the song well. Live, it doesn’t matter so much,” Hrasky says, since the band’s blistering sound levels and thrashing can cover small mistakes in the music. The recording process is a science that the band has worked to perfect over the years.

“Don’t listen to the first album, ’cause it’s not that good,” he says, and it sounds like he’s only half joking. The tracks on All of A Sudden, however, “sound a little bit more like when we’re live,” and perhaps this is the real reason behind the band’s satisfaction with the record, as well as the unprecedented depth of the album.

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Posted to Music Features on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 by rihoko.