Website
Music
Strange Attractors
Buy

Score: 8.5/10

At this point, it’s official: My Education is the greatest post-rock band ever to come out of Austin, Texas. There, I said it. Some may already be preparing hatemail; kindly direct it to . But take this seriously, now. Don’t come to me with talk of The Octopus Project, Balmorhea, or This Will Destroy You (technically from San Marcos, but close enough), because My Education blows them all out of the water. There is that one other band that put out a soundtrack to Friday Night Lights back in the day, but it hasn’t been any good since 2003, and, frankly, half of its discography just isn’t that great. But My Education has made a habit out of greatness; the debut Five Popes (originally 2001, properly released in 2004) and sophomore effort Italian (2005) were excellent, and 2008’s Bad Vibrations was even better, but Sunrise, the group’s fifth full-length release, is unmistakably the finest achievement (so far) in the band’s remarkable career.

There are a few distinct strains of post-rock. Most people would probably be quickest to identify the glitchy electronica-fusion of bands like 65daysofstatic, the cathartic crescendo-core of bands like Explosions in the Sky, and the long, drawn-out, classically-oriented apocolyptia of the blessedly-reformed Godspeed You! Black Emperor as the primary sub-types. But one strain that deserves much more attention than it commonly receives is the folksy Americana post-rock of groups like Japancakes and Six Parts Seven, which has given us some of the finest albums of the past decade—I’m thinking specifically of The Sleepy Strange and Casually Smashed into Pieces, but there are many more examples to be named. My Education falls mostly into this last category, although in keeping with the firm spirit of individualism in America(na), the group steadfastly maintains its own spin on the post-rock sound.

Sunrise finds the Austin quintet at its most cinematic, which is not too surprising given that the album is composed of pieces from a soundtrack which the group composed for F.W. Murnau’s 1927 silent film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, a landmark of expressionist cinema. Wikipedia has a good plot summary, which I would encourage listeners to read though, but which I won’t bother to rehash here. It’s fairly easy, though, to imagine the scenes that these songs would accompany based on the song titles. “A Man Alone” is full of forlorn drones, swirling into an intense agony of despair; this song likely accompanies the scene near the end where the lead character mistakenly believes his wife to be drowned. “Heave Oars,” which is perhaps the album’s best song when considered separately from the cinematic context, begins with a slow, ponderous intro and eventually builds into a breathtaking tremolo-picked climax before suddenly and curiously breaking off. This emotional song must be the soundtrack to an important scene in the middle of the film where the lead character rows his wife out to the middle of a lake, intending to drown her. The tremolos likely refer to the moment when he stands up with murderous intent, preparing to throw his wife overboard, the speed of the guitar-picking reflecting his emotional state; but at the last moment he chances to gaze into his wife’s eyes and he realizes that he loves her and cannot commit this evil deed—this precipitates the sudden conclusion of the song. Other songs can similarly be anchored to other points in the film.

I should tip my hand at this point and disclose that I’ve never actually seen the film Sunrise. In fact, all that I know about it was gleaned from that Wikipedia page that I linked to above. But I do know a bit about the art of expressionist drama, and I know that its primary aesthetic goal is to create an artistic world which symbolically expresses the characters’ inner feeling; done properly, expressionist film should give the impression that the characters are figuratively painting themselves onto the set—and, no, this doesn’t mean that slasher films count as expressionist. Expressionist drama oftentimes makes use of stock characters with no names, in part as a representation of splintering personal identities in the years surrounding World War I, but also because the specific character is far less important than the more universal emotions that he or she displays and that are reflected in the set design. My point here is that My Education has written a remarkably expressive album, such that, with only a little knowledge of the film in question, I can immediately begin imagining nightmarish situations which correspond to the minimal plot details of which I’m aware on the one hand, and to the magnificent detailing of emotion on the other, which My Education depicts in every note. The soundtrack functions in a true expressionist manner, in that it helps to reveal to us the inner turmoil of the characters onscreen, whether that screen be present physically or “merely” in our minds.

I could continue to wax rhapsodic about this album, but the point has likely been established by now. The PR for the album compares it to the magnificent soundtracks that Popol Vuh composed for Werner Herzog films in the ’70s. That’s quite a comparison, but to my mind it’s an accurate one, at least in terms of quality, if not genre. Similarly speaking, we’ve been reviewing one hell of a lot of soundtracks recently here at The Silent Ballet, some of them quite excellent (particularly Valgeir Sigurðsson‘s album), but Sunrise stands clearly above them all. For those who haven’t heard of My Education yet, then let there be no doubt: you’ve been missing one of the finest instrumental groups of the past half-decade, bar none. And the fantastic thing is this: they’re probably only going to get better.

–Tom Butcher

P.S.: We should also be praising the cover art. Isn’t it fantastic? Way better than 2008’s effort. Hooray for another form of expression!

Written By: jordan
Date Posted: 4/19/2010
Number of Views: 1154