Post-rock is a genre of surprisingly endless possibility. Rather than giving songs meaning through words, the artist uses only their instrumentation to evoke emotions from their audience, often too recalling images in the mind’s eye, in the exact opposite manner that a film score must accentuate what the viewer is seeing. Some bands choose to concentrate on bright sounds of hope (Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky) while others try to capture what doom feels like (Godspeed You! Black Emperor). This Will Destroy You falls into both categories. The epic opener of TWDY’s second full-length, “Little Smoke”, has nothing little about it. While it rains down fire, it ravages all hope. The rest of the album seems to be picking up the pieces of the wreckage and learning to live again. “Communal Blood,” conveys displaced people lashing out, wondering, “Why us?”. With “Reprise,” comes acceptance which then leads to rebuilding. “Black Dunes,” tells us of the frustration and hardships of that rebuilding. With “Hand Powdered,” at last settling in but knowing that the real work is still ahead. The beauty of an album like Tunnel Blanket is that my assessment is just my individual way to interpret the music into a cogent story. It probably has no resemblance of what TWDY had in mind when they wrote the album but that’s just part of what makes it and this genre of music so interesting.
