Call it what you will—the sound of raging Vikings, the sound of mastodons fucking, the sound of intermittently football-related high school melodrama—but there is no debating the fact that Explosions in the Sky have cultivated an unmistakable sound over the course of the decade.

By Nick Simonite

Take a moment to consider precisely how unlikely their success has been: an instrumental post-rock band from Texas made up of four scruffy white dudes (75 percent bearded before bearded was in) playing songs that clock in, on average, around eight minutes. They trade in lonely, reverb-laden guitar arpeggios and slow-builds to exhilarating crescendos. Thus, their music is singularly suited as a soundtrack to one’s daily existence, assuming that one is a marauder of the highlands.

The lack of lyrical content makes it easy (and fun!) to hang whatever metaphor or meaning you might choose on their songs. At this point, a generation has studied/smoked pot/read blogs with The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place plugging away in the background, which is an odd context for a band to fit into.

So to see Explosions in the Sky sell out Tipitina’s on Wednesday, September 29, was a cheerful inevitability. The band initially built a following based on their intense, deafening live shows, but over the last few years have largely eschewed touring, making this gig a magnet for indie rock fans across southern Louisiana. The crowd was what you would by now expect: yards of flannel, beards, smartphones, thick-rimmed glasses and white-soled shoes. There was, no doubt, a whole lotta Tweetin’ going on. Also, apparently no one over 6’1” listens to guitar-driven soundscapes—there wasn’t a pickup game’s worth of basketball talent in attendance, but there were plenty of bookish gentlemen and their pixie-cut-sporting girlfriends.

Opener Wye Oak returned to the Tipitina’s stage for the second time this month (previously opening for the dependably-tremendous Okkervil River) and turned in another solid set, closing with the crowd-pleasing “For Prayer” from 2009’s The Knot. Explosions in the Sky hopped onstage and broke into a characteristically skull-crushing wave of interconnected songs, drawing largely from this year’s excellent Take Care, Take Care, Take Care and 2007’s All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. It is a truly odd experience to watch a band tear into songs that typically serve as a backdrop for your reading or web surfing—despite the band’s best efforts, the mind does wander.

I can’t help but think that perhaps Explosions are growing too popular for their own good. This show had the potential to be epic and life-affirming, and perhaps it was more so the closer you were to the stage. From the midpoint in the room back, the softer dynamics were lost in the mass of bodies, making the set feel like a string of loud-loud-much-louder moments. The capacity crowd’s chattiness, seemingly a byproduct of Explosions’ soundtrack status, grew louder the further you got from the stage. Omnipresent clouds of pot smoke gently wafting from the audience illustrated nicely how some manage the patience for 13-minute exploratory guitar jams. Ultimately, it was yet another great show that demonstrated the importance of location, location, location.