Those Mountains

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose


Explosions In the Sky  - Remember Me as a Time of Day
How Strange Innocence | Temporary Residence | 2000 | Buy

One of my favourite discoveries of 2011 was the NBC show Friday Night Lights, which ended its run of five seasons in the US last February. I’m only at the beginning of season two, in large part because the show has been neglected by UK TV networks.

This subtle, intimate drama centres on the lives of high school football players, their coach and the small, football-obsessed town of Dillon, Texas. Its naturalistic observations of personal dramas are utterly riveting, with some of the best character development I’ve seen in a show since The Wire. It also convinced me that American football can be exciting and caused me to reappraise the music of Texas’s Explosions In The Sky, whose music features heavily in the first season.

Aside from a couple of songs, I’d previously - unfairly - written off the quartet as dull, po-faced post rock that was big on formula and emotional bombast. The use of ‘Remember Me as a Time of Day’ in the pilot of Friday Night Lights made already intense moments truly lump-in-throat and convinced me to start at the beginning with How Strange, Innocence (2000). Entirely instrumental, the album surprised me with understated, magisterial passages like ‘Magic Hours’ and the awesome thundercrack of ‘A Song For Our Fathers’. I’m looking forward to checking out their other albums albeit gradually.

  1. wearefreeschool reblogged this from thosemountains and added:
    show is sooooo good. Don’t believe...DVD cover. S’no
  2. s-oundslike reblogged this from thosemountains
  3. thosemountains posted this