Six Days and 20 Years of Explosions in the Sky
When I’m stone cold and just want to feel something, anything, Explosions in the Sky and "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean" is what I turn to. I never want them to let me go.
My friends know me as the guy that listens to angry, heavy music where people scream at each other. It’s a simplistic description but a description that has some truth to it nonetheless. So whenever I introduce my friends to Explosions in the Sky, a band that I constantly listen to, they always stare at me with a face of deranged confusion.
When I tell them that EITS don’t have any vocals yet still create the most emotionally intense music I’ve ever heard, their level of confusion reaches new heights.
I then play them “Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean”. At first, their confusion continues to rise, “It’s weird because there’s no singer,” is a common first response. Then about three minutes in something amazing happens- they slowly start to get it. They’ve been mesmerized by the sheer majesty of this Texan wonder group. The ebb and the flow, the push and the pull, the moments of peaceful tranquility and the moments of dark contemplation that are abruptly swept away by frenzied storms of action.
The band have reached a personal milestone, celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, an impressive achievement for any band. They're celebrating by heading out on an extensive tour and if you've been to an EITS show before, you know it is an incredible experience.
https://twitter.com/EITS/status/1117821602333204481
But If I’m honest “Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean” isn’t my favorite EITS song- that honor goes to “The Birth and Death of the Day”- but “Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean” is without a doubt the most emotionally draining song I’ve ever heard. The final four minutes of this track is both uplifting and shattering all at once. Listening to it makes me glad to be alive knowing that things as beautiful as this song exist in a world that is often confusing and painful, yet I’m simultaneously filled with great sadness such is the depressingly melancholy nature of the track. I’m stretching to embrace life with my left hand and reaching for that jar of sleeping pills with my right.
My friends know me as the guy that listens to angry, heavy music where people scream at each other. “Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean” is the heaviest, most emotionally intense song I know. When I’m stone cold and just want to feel something, anything, Explosions in the Sky and this song is what I turn to. I never want them to let me go.
Listen to "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean":
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