When I listen to This Will Destroy You I almost always get the same series of images in my head. An empty highway at night. Votive candles flickering in their colored glass cases. Distant lights on the horizon.
Previous journalists have drawn parallels between TWDY and Explosions in the Sky, though the band has bristled at this comparison. Like Explosions in the Sky, This Will Destroy You have a long name, are from Texas, and make emotive instrumental music full of dramatic peaks and valleys. But all of that is on the surface, and This Will Destroy You’s music seems primarily to lurk below. A more apt comparison might be Godspeed! You Black Emperor, who are also instrumental but veer heavier, eerier. Whereas Explosions in the Sky wrote the music for Friday Night Lights, G!YBE had a song feature prominently in 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle’s tense and desperate post-apocalyptic zombie film. Here we get closer to the sound and feel of This Will Destroy You.
At almost every moment on TWDY’s most recent album, 2014’s Another Language, Badalamenti synths hover just beneath the surface. Guitar lines are echoed by ghostly vibraphones, shimmering like lights on the edge of oblivion. When the band really starts to dig in on third track “Serpent Mound,” the result is crushingly loud and doomy, sounding like an instrumental Deafheaven. The song’s emotional space is massive, without a single linguistic waypoint beyond the mysterious prehistoric effigy site of its title.
All of the songs and song titles on Another Language evoke similarly occult images. Spaces just on the edge of visibility. “Mother Opiate” is a Bohren und der Club of Gore-esque tone piece that could almost be described as “jazzy” in some netherworld. The swirling keys and delayed feedback of “The Puritan” sound like they were plucked from a cutscene in one of the original Silent Hill games, finding a hidden point of connection between fog, despair and religious imagery. Album closer “God’s Teeth” reuses many of these effects while repeating a sort of reversed siren sound that brings to mind ghostly flashes in the dark. Will-o’-the-wisps. Haunted memories.
Another Language by This Will Destroy You
At first blush the album’s title seems to suggest a departure from the band’s instrumental past. To learn another language is to become steeped in words, gestures, and communicative rhythms. Learning another language is necessarily an act of exchange—words exchanged for new words; the exchange of thoughts between two speakers. Another Language suggests talking, speaking, and the prospect of lengthy and informative conversation.
This Will Destroy You’s music is made up of humming silences, multiple shades of darkness vibrating in a void. So what does it mean for this album—a soundscape-heavy set that could be described as “post-rock,” “doom,” or “dark ambient,” to be titled Another Language?
More than anything else, this was the question I wanted to ask the band as I was prepping for my interview. If this album was the result of, or was itself, another language, what was it saying? But after two emails to the band’s press contact there was nothing in the way of response. Days passed without a word.
If silence speaks (as is sometimes claimed in political debates) it only communicates one thing: itself. Silence is monolithic in this sense. It can be passed around within language in the form of pauses, beats, bated breath. Or it can exist on the outskirts of language: the always looming threat of conversation’s end. The end of things to say. In all cases, silence is the experience of language’s other: an Other language.
Over the coming days I continued to listen to Another Language, but the reality of the situation began to sink in. There would be no interview. Just as there are no words exchanged on the record, there would be no exchange of words about the record.
I had called out into the void. The void’s only answer was silence.
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This Will Destroy You
Sep 20, 7pm, $13.50+
The Ritz, San Jose
theritzsanjose.com
.This Will Destroy You At The Ritz
